1. I started looking at Alexander M. Ščerbak's "Reconstrucing the
Manchu-Tungusic Proto-language" (2012) tonight. It lists sample
proto-forms divided into six semantic categories. I only have time to
discuss the first, "Terms for Day, Night, Month, and Year" from a
Jurchen/Manchu (J/M) perspective.

1a. *ineŋī 'day'

J/M and Oroqen are the only languages cited with -ŋg-. J/M
have hardened intervocalic *-ŋ- to a prenasalized stop. This
seems in line with the fortition of initial *ŋ- in Manchu gala
'hand' from Ščerbak's*ŋāla.

Jin Qizong reads Jurchen

'hand'

as <nga.la> ngala.

However, the vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters has a Chinese
transcription *xa la pointing to gala [ʁala] c. 1500.

<GOLD.un> alcun (or ancun?) 'gold'
(originally spelled with a single character <GOLD>?)

Perhaps *alcun > *ancun > *aɲcun > *ajcun
> *ajsyn > Manchu aisin [ajɕin]. But then why
does have Manchu have an unrelated word alcu 'the
concave side of a toy made from an animal's ankle bone' with the -lcu
sequence that became -isi- in 'gold'? Absolute regularity would
demand that alcu is either a loanword or originated from
something other than *alcu: i.e., Manchu developed a new -lcu
after the old one became -isi. Rozycki (1983: 27) identified alcu
as a loanword in Tungusic from Mongolic, so a workaround to explain -lcu
in terms of sound laws is unnecessary in that case. But what of, say,
Manchu kalcun 'spirit' which has no Mongolic source? Why didn't
it become †kaisin?

The fronting of the second vowel is a problem, as Manchu does have
words with isu and aisu: e.g., gisun
(not †gisin) 'word' and aisuri (not †aisiri)
'a kind of bird'. The 'missing link'
form in Alchuka has a second vowel that is neither palatal nor
labial: anʃïn.

The palatal c is also a problem, as Turkic and Mongolic have
t, and the original vowel of the second syllable was not
palatal, so this is not a case of *ti becoming ci (a
change which didn't happen in Jurchen and wouldn't happen until Manchu).

I wonder if the word was borrowed independently by Turkic, Mongolic
or Tungusic from different varieties of some fourth type of language -
perhaps Xiongnu or Rouran.

2. Today I found the Pyu phrase tiṁ priṅ·ḥ kdaṅ· 'LOC city
?' (27.6) which at first glance appears to have double case marking. kdaṅ·
ooks like the second half of ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ· 'with, including'. But
'with in the city' makes no sense. Moreover, ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ·
precedes nouns: e.g., ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ· saḥ 'with sons' (16.4A).
Maybe kdaṅ· does not modify priṅ·ḥ 'city'. Maybe kdaṅ·
even has nothing to do with ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ·.

3. I am not sure how to write kdaṅ· in phonological
notation. I used to take it at face value as /k.daŋ/ with a period
indicating a potential schwa. But lately I think it might be ambiguous.

It is unclear if *schwa or some other minimal vowel contrasted with
zero after preinitials. The above scenario assumes such a contrast
existed but was not indicated in the script (except indirectly if a
following consonant was lenited).

kt-type voiceless-voiceless sequences are absent from the
12th century Kubyaukgyi text, suggesting that /kt/ may have merged with
/kət/.

The sequence ktha is hypothetical; the only instance of kth-
in the entire corpus is kthor·ḥ '?' (27.6).

Aspirates are rare in Pyu. Aspiration after stops may not be
phonemic: e.g., kthor·ḥ might be /ktorH/ rather than /ktʰorH/
or /kətʰorH/. (It cannot be /kətorH/ because an intervocalic /t/ would
voice to [d], and the word would have been spelled †kdor·ṃḥ
[kəðorH].)

/rH/ may have been voiceless [r̥] or [r] preceded by a vowel with
phonation and/or a tone.

1. Japanese 蝦蛄 shako 'Oratosquilla
oratoria' is a strange word. It is the only Japanese word I
know of with sh- corresponding to standard Mandarin x-.
It looks like a recent borrowing from Mandarin 蝦蛄 xiāgū, itself
an interesting word for reasons I won't go into here. Yet shako
ends in -o like a Sino-Japanese borrowing from Middle Chinese
rather than -u, though I doubt Middle Chinese is relevant here.
In short, the word seems as if it mixes borrowing patterns:

How was this word borrowed? When was it first attested? I presume it
must have displaced a Japanese word since shako live in
Japanese waters.

3.7.9:45: I should have read the
Japanese Wikipedia article on shako before asking those
questions. Going by what it says - I have no other references on hand -
it seems the resemblance to Mandarin 蝦蛄 xiāgū is fortuitous.

The Edo period name for shako was shakunage because
when boiled, it turned purple like a shakunage
flower(Rhododendron subg. Hymenanthes). Shakunage is
spelled as 石楠花 <ROCK CAMPHOR FLOWER> or 石南花 <ROCK SOUTH
FLOWER>. I suspect that even though the spellings could be taken as
meaningful, they are actually phonogram sequences. Shakunage
then got shortened to shaku or shako, and the latter
was then respelled as Chinese 蝦蛄 'mantis shrimp'.

If 石楠花 ~ 石南花 shakunage and 蝦蛄 shako are actually
native Japanese words in sinographic disguise, their sha is in
need of explanation since sha is normally only in loanwords. A
major exception is 喋る shaberu
'to chat', a modern, common colloquial word whose origin is unknown to
me.

A shift of -u to -o is unusual in Japanese. I can't
think of any examples. Normally the vowel shift goes the other way
around: -o > -u. So I wonder if shako is
actually a more conservative form and if the association with shakunage
was the product of later confusion. Shaku would then be a
clipped form of shakunage or from shako with vowel
raising. However, normally o-raising is not in final position,
so that might favor the clipping hypothesis. I don't have the
dialectological background needed to solve this problem.

3.7.6:41: Wiktionary lists Sino-Japanese Go-on
readings ge and ku for 蝦
and 蛄, but my policy is to regard Sino-Japanese readings as
hypothetical unless they occur in attested words. So many readings in
dictionaries are generated on the basis of fanqie and knowledge
of the general patterns of the two major strata of Sino-Japanese, Go-on
and Ka-on. I don't know of any words in which 蝦 and 蛄 are read as ge
and ku, so I only list ga, ka, and ko here on
the basis of 蝦蟇 gama 'toad', 魚蝦 gyoka
'fish and shrimp', and 蟪蛄 keiko 'a kind of cicada'.

There is no single way a brain becomes “rewired,” explains
Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of UCLA’s Center for
Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice. The process happens
differently, depending on how we read. Readers of Chinese (an
ideographic language) rewire differently from those who read Spanish
(a logographic one).

It upsets me for three reasons.

First, languages can't be characterized by their writing systems.

Second, the Chinese script isn't "ideographic"; no writing system
is. It isn't really "logographic" either, though that term is less
wrong than "ideographic", as there is a partial correlation between
Chinese words and Chinese characters.

Third, Spanish orthography is not "logographic"; Spanish is written
in an alphabet, not a script with thousands of characters for words or
morphemes. Strictly speaking, no writing system is logographic either -
there are too many words in any language (Toki Pona aside)
for the
one-character-per-word principle to be viable.

Today I learned Canada has its own
Ukrainian dialect. I was surprised to see cash register
borrowed as a spelling-based кеш реґистер (?) kesh régyster
rather than as a pronunciation-based кеш реджистер †kesh rédzhyster.

1. Not that it matters much, but when I tried to copy and paste
'pig' from the last day of the pig,
I discovered that entry was missing from my index page! I've
restored
it; it'll eventually disappear after the entry preceding it does. As
far as I know, I've never accidentally deleted an entry between entries
like that before.

2. I'm stuck in Pirahã (P; getting tired of typing the tilde) mode
now. It could be worse. I've only glanced at Daniel L. Everett's Don't
Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
(2008). I'll read the whole thing eventually - I have two books to
finish. I don't want to get too involved with Pirahã. But a glimpse of
any language can offer data for future use, and so here I jot my notes
on the little I've seen based on the sketch on pp. xi-xii in his book.

2a. Vowels

Here are the allophones:

/i/
[ɪ] ~ [ɛ] ~ [i]

/o/ [u] ~ [o]

/a/ [ɑ]

Here are the allophones in order of apparent frequency:

Phoneme \ frequency

1st

2nd

3rd

/i/

[ɪ]

[ɛ]

[i]

/o/

[u]

[o]

/a/

[ɑ]

And here is a chart of the allophones:

Front

Back

[i]

[u]

[ɪ]

(gap 2)

(gap 1)

[o]

[ɛ]

(gap 4)

(gap 3)

[ɑ]

/i o/ constitute a class. They are the only vowels with allophonic
variation and the only vowels that condition consonantal allophony (see
below).

I don't know why o was chosen to symbolize the nonlow back
vowel if its most frequent allophone is [u].

I am surprised there are no allophones [e] and [ʊ] (gaps 1-2). Are
the P careful to avoid those vowels, or is Everett's description
simplified?

The absence of [æ] and [ɔ] (gaps 3-4) may be motivated by the need
to preserve 'buffer space' between /i o/ and /a/; such vowels combine
characteristics of /i o/ and /a/.

2b. Consonants

Here are the allophones of the two most interesting consonants:

Phoneme

initially

between /i/ and /o/

elsewhere

/g/

[n]

[ɺ͡ɺ̼] or [g]

[g]

/b/

[m]

[ʙ]

[b]

/s/ palatalizes to [ʃ] before /i/.

The remaining consonants do not have allophony in Everett's
introductory account: /ʔ h k t p/. (I won't go into the issue of
whether [k] is really an allophone of [h].)

The two voiced consonants can be regarded as front and back. (I
almost wrote labial and nonlabial, but t'nonlabial' /g/ in fact has a linguolabial
allophone [ɺ͡ɺ̼]; the subscript 'seagull' indicates linguolabiality.)

The nonlow vowels condition nonstop allophones of the voiced
consonants: the lateral flap [ɺ͡ɺ̼] and the trill [ʙ]. I wanted to say
continuant allophones, but Wikipedia says,

Whether laterals, taps/flaps, or trills are continuant
is not conclusive.

Are /g b/ the results of a merger of a larger set of earlier voiced
consonants?

- Were there originally three voiced consonants */g d b/?

- /g/ could be a merger of */g/ and */d/

- an earlier initial nasal allophone [ŋ] of /g/ could have
merged with [n].

- [ɺ͡ɺ̼] could have originally been the /i o/-allophone of */d/

- this lateral flap allophone may in turn be a merger of an
original *liquid and a lenited allophone of */d/; cf. how Korean
intervocalic /r/ is a blend of the liquids *r and *l
and lenited *t

- [g] could have originally been the /i o/-allophone of /g/

- Were nasals */ŋ n m/ originally distinct from stops */g d b/?

Looking at what little remains of P's extinct relatives may help to
answer these questions. The initial consonant of Yahahí ~
Jahahí is intriguing, as P has nothing like it (anymore?).

1. I've glanced at Pirahã
phonology before but never noticed two
things until today:

1a. Pirahã has no nasal vowels. So why does the exonym of the
Hi'aiti'ihi 'Straight Ones'
have a nasal vowel? Is it a Portuguese borrowing from some other
indigenous language? (And what does the apostrophe represent? Is it
another way to write the glottal stop which is written as x
elsewhere?)

(3.3.20:05: No, the apostrophe indicates a high tone; it seems to be
an easily typeable substitute for the acute accent that Everett uses.
Vowels not followed by apostrophes have low tones.)

(3.3.23:58: And even if Pirahã has no nasal vowels now, maybe it
once did. The name could date back to the first contact with Portuguese
speakers.)

1b. Pirahã has three vowels

/i/

/o/

/a/

which are not in a 'top-heavy' classical 'triangle':

/i/

/u/

/a/

I have never seen a Pirahã-type 'left-heavy' triangle
before. Do any languages have the other two hypothetically possible
layouts?

'Right-heavy'

/e/

/u/

/a/

'Bottom-heavy'

/ɨ/

/æ/

/ɑ/

3.4.0:33: Today (3.3) I thought it would be interesting to see what
distributional phenomena and allophony would motivate such analyses.
Here are some syllables in hypothetical languages with the latter two
types of vowel systems:

'Right-heavy' with nine phonetic vowels

/e/

/u/

/a/

/k/

[kə]

[kɯ]

[ka]

/t/

[te]

[ty]

[tæ]

/p/

[pø]

[pu]

[pɒ]

'Bottom-heavy' with nine phonetic vowels

/ɨ/

/æ/

/ɑ/

/k/

[kɨ]

[kæ]

[kɑ]

/t/

[ti]

[tɛ]

[ta]

/p/

[pu]

[pœ]

[pɒ]

I've designed the allophones so each phonemic symbol matches one
allophone. But what if they don't? What if the 'bottom-heavy' language
had only two phonetic high vowels distributed like this?

[i]

[u]

/k/

[ki]

-

/t/

[tɕi]

-

/p/

-

[pu]

Do those syllables share a single vowel phoneme? What if speakers
rhymed [i] and [u]? Should that vowel phoneme be symbolized as /ɨ/
halfway between front [i] and [u] even though [ɨ] isn't actually in the
language? Does it make sense for /t/ to palatalize before nonpalatal
/ɨ/? That is, in fact, what I think happened in Late Old Chinese: e.g.,
之 *tə > *tɨə > *tɕɨə 'genitive marker'.

3.4.0:32: And I forgot to mention why I mentioned that ... I went on
to write item 2 without finishing 1c.

If [k]
is an allophone of /hi/, then is it possible to pronounce Hioóxio
as Koóxio? What would be the phonetic motivation for
hardening /hi/ into [k]?

3.4.21:02: Answering my first question, no:

The sequences [hoa] and [hia] are said to be in free
variation with [kʷa] and [ka], at least in some words.

But why wouldn't [ha] be in free variation with [ka]? I thought
perhaps at one time pre-Pirahã had *[q] and *[k] with Mongolian-type
distribution: *[qa] but *[ku] and *[ki]. *[qa] became [ha], whereas
*[kua] and *[kia] became [hoa] ~ [kʷa] and [hia] ~ [ka]. However, if
*high vowels conditioned *[k], why aren't [hi hu] in free variation
with [ki ku]?

I'm surprised to see presumably disyllabic [hia] in free variation
with monosyllabic [kʷa]. Does such variation only apply if /i/ and /a/
are both the same tone? Do /hía/ (high + low tone) and /hiá/ (low +
high tone) exist? If they do, do they have monosyllabic free variants?

2. I have long been puzzled by the correspondences of the codas in
the early written Sino-Tibetan languages. Today it finally occurred to
me to see how much more confusion adding Evans' (2001)
Proto-Southern-Qiang tones would cause. In chronological order from
left to right (except for Proto-Southern-Qiang which can't be dated;
I've put it last since it alone has the innovation of losing most
codas):

Numeral

Old Chinese

Pyu

Old Tibetan

Pre-Tangut

Tangut

Pre-Burmese

Proto-Southern Qiang

one

*-k

-k

-g

*-k

1-

*-k

*-Ø

two

*-(t)s

-Ø

-s (< *-ds?)

*-(t?)X

*-t

(*low tone)

three

*-m

-mḥ

-m

*-m?

*-mḥ

*?

four

*-s

-Ø

-Ø

*-X

*-ḥ

*low tone

five

*-ʔ

-Ø

-Ø

*-Ø

*-ḥ

*low tone

six

*-k

-k?

-g

*-k

*-k

(*high tone)

seven

*-t

-t?

-

*-Ø

*-t

(*high tone)

eight

*-t

-t

-d

*-t?

*-t

(*low tone)

nine

*-ʔ

-Ø

-Ø

*-X

*-ḥ

*?

ten

-

*-H

2-

-

*low tone

The Tangut numerals from 'one' to 'nine' all have the 'level tone' (1-
in my notation which I adopted from Arakawa Shintarō), whereas 'ten'
has the 'rising tone' (2- in my notation) from a source I
symbolize as *-H, possibly a glottal consonant.
I doubted there would be any correlation between the two Tangut tones
and the two tones of Proto-Southern Qiang, its closest relative among
the languages above. And of course there was none.

3.4.0:34: Did tone 1 spread through the closed set of Tangut
numerals 'one' through 'nine"/

3.4.21:14: Notes on individual numerals:

'One': Straightforward. Tangut and Proto-Southern Qiang do
not preserve any final stops.

'Two': Pre-Burmese points to *-t, Old Chinese, Old
Tibetan, and Tangut are ambiguous, and Pyu has an open syllable.

The function of the *-s in Old Chinese and Old Tibetan is
unknown.

I have no idea what Tangut *X is; it is a dummy symbol for
the source of the equally mysterious feature -' which
distinguishes certain rhymes in Tangut. I have never found any
correlation between *X/-' and any feature in any other
language. It could be a Proto-Sino-Tibetan feature preserved only in
Tangut, though I doubt that.

'Three': At first I was pleased to see -ḥ in both Pyu
and pre-Burmese. But look at 'four', 'five', and 'nine' where
pre-Burmese has a -ḥ absent from Pyu. Pre-Burmese -ḥ
doesn't correlate with Old Chinese *-ʔ.

'Four': Might Pre-Burmese -ḥ here be from *-s
rather than *-ʔ? Why was this *-s added? There is no
trace of it in Pyu (where *-s probably became -ḥ) or
pre-Tangut (where *-s may have become *-H).

'Ten': The languages do not share a common root. This is the
only pre-Tangut word with *-H in the set, and that *-H
/ Tangut 'rising' tone corresponds to Proto-Southern Qiang low tone ...
just like pre-Tangut *-Ø / Tangut 'level' tone which can also
correspond to Proto-Southern Qiang high tone!

That site is not far from Birobidzhan. I
just learned that Biro- is a reference to the Bira River -
'River River'. Bira
is 'river' in Jurchen, Manchu, and other Tungusic languages; the
word
can be reconstructed for Proto-Tungusic. I wonder what specific
language is the source of that name and of the name of the Bidzhan
River. Wiktionary does not have etymologies for eithername.

3. While looking at Evans' (2001) reconstructions of Proto-Southern
Qiang numerals, I realized why his PSQ *a (low tone)
corresponds to Tangut 5981 𗈪0a1
'one' rather than †i4 < *a. Brightening (*a
> i) in Tangut might only have applied in word-final
position, and *a 'one' only appeared before other words, so its
vowel remained intact.

A wilder possibility is that 0a1 is from *ʕa with a
pharyngeal *ʕ- that blocked brightening and conditioned Grade
I, but there is no evidence for such a pharyngeal in pre-Tangut.

I reconstruct 𗈪0a1 'one' with
Grade I (hence -1 in my notation) because it was transcribed in
late 12th century northwestern Chinese as 阿 1a1 in the Pearl
in the Palm glossary.

The 0 indicates that I don't know the tone of 'one'. Maybe
it literally had 'zero' tone in the sense that its tone may have been
neutral.

4. Speaking of numerals, I was surprised to learn that Dmitri
Mendeleev used Sanskrit numeral prefixes (eka- 'one', dvi-
'two', tri- 'three') in the periodic table he submitted for
publication 150 years ago today. Why
Sanskrit?

5. Looking at Alexander
Vovin's (2017) reconstruction of Old Korean (OK) *-arari
for
a verbal suffix 下里 <BELOW.ri> that he seems to regard as cognate
to Middle Korean (MK) àráj 'bottom' made me wonder how it lines
up with John
R. Bentley's 2000 reconstruction of *arUsI 'below,
lower' for Paekche (P):

Paekche

*a

rU

sI

Old Korean

*a

ra

ri

Middle Korean

à

rá

j

The correspodence of P *rU and OK *ra may point to a
Proto-Koreanic (or Proto-South Koreanic?) *ɔ.

The P and OK words may have different suffixes added to a shared
root *arɔ. If the Old Korean liquid had been *l, I
might propose a Proto-Koreanic voiceless *l̥ that became P *s
and
OK *l. But OK *l would not have lenited to zero in MK:
OK †arali would have become MK †àrári.

烞 has a
Wiktionary entry
with a Mandarin reading pò but no meaning. zdic.net defines 烞
as 'the sound of cracking from heat'. It has no definitions for the
other three characters.

7. 加藤昌彦 Katō
Atsuhiko (2009) reconstructs a ten-vowel system for Proto-Pwo Karen
including two unrounded high nonfront vowels *ɨ and *ɯ
on the basis of dialects preserving a contrast between them. I do not
recall ever seeing a description of a living language with a /ɨ ɯ/
contrast before. There seems to be a common assumption that
Proto-Sino-Tibetan had a small number of vowels. How such a small
inventory expanded into the larger inventories of languages like
Proto-Pwo Karen remains to be explained.

8. Today is the centennial of Korea's 三一運動 Samil undong, the
March 1st
Movement. Looking at the text of the
Korean Declaration of Independence (image
/ English),
I was surprised by how relatively modern it looks. It lacks the
obsolete vowel symbol arae a (ㆍ), perhaps the most striking
characteristic of old hangul orthography. It does have ᄯ <st> for
modern ㄸ <tt> and instances of standalone ㅣ <i> instead of
이 <Øi>: e.g., ㅣ며 <i myŏ> as well as modern 이며 <Øi
myŏ> for i-mye 'be-and' after vowel-final words.

9. The Jurchen word for 'honey' apparently only survives in Chinese
transcription as 希粗 *xi tsʰu in the vocabulary of the Bureau of
Interpreters (#1025). The corresponding Manchu word is hibsu
[xipsu].

Does *tsʰ represent [tsʰ] < *ps in that Jurchen
dialect (which could not be ancestral to Manchu which preserved *ps),
or does the transcription conceal a Jurchen [ps]?

How would the Jurchen ancestor of hibsu have been written?
Neither a phonogram <hip> nor a logogram <HONEY> have been
found. Would the word have been written <hi.pu.su>? We probably
do
not yet have a complete set of Jurchen characters. Parts of the Jurchen
Character Book are missing; there are characters in inscriptions
and the Sino-Jurchen vocabularies that are not in that presumably early
catalog, and there may be characters that are not in any of those
sources.

It may be significant that all five examples of causatives are Grade
III/IV syllables (written by Guillaume with -j- following Li
Fanwen and by me with -3/-4). I hypothesize that Grade III/IV
was conditioned by *high-vowel presyllables. So the causative prefix
may have been *Pɯ-. (*ɯ is my symbol for an unknown high
vowel. Maybe I should just write *I or *Y.)

Gong also gives examples of zero ~ -w- alternations with
Tangut without any obvious semantic function. Those pairs outnumber the
causative pairs and need further investigation. Some may be doublets
involving *P-preinitials or presyllables that had nothing to do
with causative *Pɯ-: e.g., perhaps

𗪺 3354 1ghi2 'power'

𘏐 5307 1ghwi2 'power'

are two different reflexes of a pre-Tangut noun *Pʌ.gr[a/e]
'power' (Note the *nonhigh vowel in the presyllable needed to condition
both lenition and Grade II.) One lost its presyllable before *P-
could condition *-w-:

(Tone 1 is automatically assigned to pre-Tangut syllables without *-H.)

The exact relative chronology of changes is unknown, though the
following suborders are certain:

*-g- must lenite before presyllabic vowels are lost

*Pʌ- must be lost after its vowel conditioned lenition

It would be simpler but not necessary for *-r- to be lost
before labial metathesis. Keeping *-ɣr- intact up until
metathesis would require *P- to 'jump' over two consonants, not
just one: *P.ɣr- > *ɣrw-.

It would be simpler but not necessary for *-r- to be lost
before lenition. Keeping *-r- intact up until lenition would
require lenition to occur between sonorants in general rather than just
vowels.

I think Gong Xun may be right about Grade II being uvularization:
i.e., i2 was phonetically [iʶ] conditioned by a medial *-r-
that was perhaps uvular *[ʁ] in the vicinity of low vowels.

*r- by a high vowel like the *rɯ- of *rɯ.nej
'red' was not uvular and did not condition uvulariztion/Grade II; *rɯ.nej
became Grade IV 1ne4.

Aside from the macroproblem of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) probably
not existing, a microproblem is the proposed survival of 'PTB' *g-
in Proto-Karen. PTB *b-r-gyat is a projection of Written
Tibetan brgyad 'eight' back into the past, complete with a *-g-
that is a
Tibetan innovation - the product of Li Fang-Kuei's law. The
consonant cluster †bry- does not exist in Written Tibetan.

I think Tibetan and PK have different prefixes attached to a common *r-root
for 'eight'. (But what were those prefixes for?) Chinese has a labial
prefix like Tibetan (八 *pret 'eight') whereas Japhug kɯrcat
'eight' and Evans' (2001: 2460 Proto-Southern Qiang *khr[a/e]
'eight' have velar prefixes. (Northern Qiang also has a velar prefix:
e.g., Mawo khaʳ.) Tangut 𘉋1ar4
< *rjat 'eight' may preserve the bare root. It might have
had a presyllable *Cɯ-, but there is no internal evidence
pointing to either *p- or *k-. If the Tangut form had a
presyllable, I would guess it started with *k- since Tangut is
more closely related to Japhug and Qiang than to Tibetan and Chinese.

The vowel of PK *grɔtD ‘eight’ is surprising
because other languages lack rounded vowels in the word: e.g., Pyu,
sometimes thought to be Karenic, has hrat·ṁ /r̥ät/ 'eight'.
(Could Pyu /r̥/ be from *gr- via *ɣr-? There is no gr-
in Pyu.)

2. I just learned there's a lesser known 'Seoul' - no, not a town
with the same name as the capital, but a homophonous unrelated
Sino-Korean compound 暑鬱 서울 sŏul,
a Chinese medical term that I could calque as 'thermopression'.

I have tried also tried installing the Microsoft Old Hangul
keyboard but I can't get it to actually type in Hangul just in Latin
letters.

There are only 119 results. I guess almost no English speakers care
about this. I used BabelMap to type ᄫᅳᆯ <βɯr> above, but there's
no way I'm going to type more than a few Middle Korean words that way.

5. The link above goes to an enthusiast of the グルジア Gurujia
language. I
should have guessed what that was. Other katakana names are the
obvious ジョージア Jōjia and カルトリ Karutori (< ქართული Kartuli).
Kanji short names are 具語 Gugo and 喬語 Kyōgo; -go is
'language', and Kyō is the Japanese reading of the first
character of 喬治, the Chinese version of 'George'.

6. It just occurred to me that 白 <WHITE> in 白村 Hakusuki
could be just as un-Chinese as 村 <VILLAGE> suki. Suki is
not a Japanese word. According to Wikipedia, Kōjien
regards it as an Old Korean word for 'village'. But I don't know of any
similar Korean word. Could it be a cognate of Korean 시골 shigol
'village' in an extinct Koreanic language: namely, Paekche?

If <WHITE> - read as *bæk in Late Old and Early Middle
Chinese - is actually a phonogram, could it represent a native Koreanic
word - a cognate of Korean 박 pak 'gourd'? Then the Old Korean
name underlying Hakusuki would be 'Gourd Village'.

(3.1.19:56: In 三國史記 Samguk sagi, 朴 [Late Old Chinese *pʰɔk]
is a transcription of the surname of the founder of Shilla and is
glossed as 'gourd'.

If that gloss is correct, what I
wrote two entries ago could be wrong. It may not be necessary to
regard Late Old
Chinese 斯盧 for Old Korean *sela 'Shilla' from 三國志 Sanguozhi
[Records of the Three Kingdoms, c. 280] as an early transcription *sie
la predating the shift of *-a to *-ɔ in what I
could call Very Late Old Chinese. Perhaps Old Koreans speakers
thought Very Late Old Chinese *-ɔ was similar to their *a
[phonetically back [ɑ]?] and wrote 'Shilla' as very late Old Chinese 斯盧
*sie lɔ
predating the shift of *-a to *-ɔ. According to Coblin
[1983: 103], the *a to *-ɔ [his *-o] shift was
complete by the Western Jin: i.e., the late 3rd century when the Sanguozhi
was compiled. But there is no guarantee that 斯盧 was a transcription
invented on the spot in 28X; it could have been created prior to the
raising and rounding of *a. In any case, reading 斯盧 as
Sino-Korean saro < earlier Sino-Korean sʌro < 8th
century Late Middle Chinese *sz̩ lo is anachronistic. Even a
6th century Early Middle Chinese reading like *si[ə] lo would
be
anachronistic.)

Renowned translator William Scott Wilson offers a fresh version
of the Tao Te Ching that will resonate with the modern reader.
While most translators have relied on the "new" text of 200 B.C.,
Wilson went back another 300 years to work from the original characters
used during Lao Tzu's lifetime. By referring to these earlier
characters, Wilson is able to offer a text that is more authentic in
language and nuance, yet preserves all the beauty and poetry of the
work.

The "original characters"? What does that mean? That earlier shapes
of the characters somehow give more insight? Why not the 'original wording'?
Because "characters" sound so much exotic?

No, he really is referring to the shapes of the characters. In his
own words, "the nuance and meaning of the original characters was
lost"! (p. 11) My Exotik East alarm is ringing. Loudly. No one's going
to invite me to a Japanophile conference. Sniff.

I don't see him using a special old-timey font or anything for the
characters. Are their olde shapes a secret for his erudite eyes only?
(And does it even occur to him that the Mandarin readings he uses are
just as anachronistic as his modern font?)

It gets worse ... "Chinese, as a language based on ideographs" (p.
27) ... characters which wouldn't exist if there weren't a spoken
language to begin with. Characters which the majority of Chinese
through time barely knew or didn't know at all.

The legend of an "ideographic language" is false; reading
Chinese is not grokking images of a man standing by his words or a
woman kneeling under a roof or a bear riding a skateboard through a
dentist's office or whatever. (p. xii)

Of all the documents of the pre-Han China, no one has attracted
and interested Western readers so much as the short and exceedingly
pensive treatise Tao te king [= Tao Te Ching] attributed to an
unknown author around 400 BC. It has been translated several dozen
times into Western languages. The majority of these "translations"
merely reveal that their translators have had very little knowledge of
the Chou-time language.

[...]

In most of these translations [the ones Karlgren regards as
"[t]he most serious attempts" which makes one wonder what he thinks of
the others] we find lines interspersed in the text, being
explanatory speculations of the translators, for which additions the
classical Chinese text has no corresponding passages.

It would be nice to see a Jurchen translation of the Tao Te
Ching. Here's a
Manchu version with the original Chinese and Karlgren's translation
for comparison:

道可道也，

doro be doro oci ojo-ro-ngge,

'way ACC way TOP be-IPFV.PTCP.NMLZ'

BK: 'The Tao Way that can be (told of:) defined'

非恒道也。

enteheme doro waka.

'constant way NEG'

BK: 'is not the constant Way,'

名可名也，

gebu be gebu oci ojo-ro-ngge,

'name ACC name TOP be-IPFV.PTCP.NMLZ'

BK: 'the names that can be named (used as terms)'

非恒名也。

enteheme gebu waka.

'constant way NEG'

BK: 'are not constant names (terms).'

The Wikibooks translation does not match what I see:

There are ways but the way is uncharted;

There are names but not nature in words

I'm glad the ideographic myth hasn't taken root in Jurchenology or
Khitanology. The enigmatic construction of many Tangut characters makes
tangraphy fertile ground for the ideographic myth.

11. I finally got around to rediscovering Blench
and Post 2013. Too much to quote and comment on here. Maybe I can
seriallize my reaction upon rereading it.

12. I keep forgetting to mention my idea of Jurchen

<sin> [ɕiɴ]

in 'rat' possibly being a phonogram derived from or cognate to
Chinese 剩, pronounced *ʂiŋ
in Liao and JIn Chinese. The graph could go back to the Parhae script.
In Parhae times, the eastern Late Middle Chinese reading of 剩 would
have been something like *ɕɦɨŋ. (But why is the Sino-Korean
reading from that period ing [iŋ] instead of †sŭng
[sɯŋ]?)

and various other words where there is no nasal or trace of one. (A
nasal would have blocked the lenition of *qʰ to h [χ]. *saɴ-qʰa-i
would have become Jurchen †sakai.)

And reinterpreting the second character as <nggiyan> isn't
going to work because

<RED.nggiyan?> 'red'

can't be fulnggiyan which violates Jurchen
phonotactics. And
the phonotactics of any language I've ever seen. But what if 'red' was fulanggiyan
with an a to breakup the bizarre sequence -lngg-?

(2.25.21:11: I did not pick a at random to be a filler
vowel; Janhunen (2003: 7) reconstructed Proto-Mongolic *xulaxan
'red'. That *x- is from an even earlier *p-. Is there
any reason to suppose that Mongghulfulaan
'red' has f- from *x- < *p- as opposed to
straight from *p-?)

2.26.18:50: Curiously that Khitan character is not in N4631 which
has two near-lookalikes:

0335 and 0280

I do not know whether those are variants of <TIGER>. I have
not seen 0280 in calendrical contexts (but perhaps its contexts involve
physical tigers), and I have never seen 0335 in context. Here are four
instances of 0280 that I have seen:

......

Epitaph for the 蕭袍魯 Great Prince of the North, line 3 (1041)

......

Epitaph for 蕭袍魯 Xiao Paolu, lines 4-5, 7 (1090)

......

Epitaph for 耶律褀 Yelü Qi, line 23 (1108)

I have no idea where word divisions are. I have provided the
characters preceding and following 280 without knowing whether they
represented words or parts of words.

Ramsey's other informant is a woman with the unusual (to me) name
趙五木禮 <cho o.mok.rye> Cho Omongnye. Are
the characters of her trisyllabic personal name simply phonograms
(there is a native word omok 'concave' - a strange morpheme for
a name - and no native rye; nye 'yes' cannot possibly be
relevant) or is the name really a meaningful
sequence of three morphemes 五 'five', 木 'wood/tree', and 禮
'ceremony/decorum'?

I was hoping South Hamgyŏng would support my hypothesis of
Proto-Korean *e, but ... I'll have to describe how my dream
crumbled some other time.

3. I saw an online ad for Rocketman
starring Taron
Egerton, a graduate of Ysgol
Penglais School, a name that is structually like the equally
redundant Mount Fuji-san in reverse: Ysgol at the
beginning is Welsh for 'school', just as -san at the end is
Sino-Japanese for 'mountain'.

4. 2.27.21:14: BONUS FOURTH ITEM: I forgot to mention a solution I
had on the 22nd to this problem:
How can Jurchen

<sol.go> 'Korea' (cf. Manchu solho 'id.')

and Middle Mongolian 莎郎中合思 solangqa-s 'Koreans'
with -o- be reconciled with the Late Old Chinese transcriptions
斯盧 ~ 斯羅 of Old Korean *sela
with *-e-?

斯盧 and 斯羅 appear to be from two different strata of transcriptions
reflecting different stages of Late Old Chinese:

斯盧 *sie la (in more precise notation, *sie lɑ)
predates the shift of *-a to *-ɔ and the shift of *-aj
to *-a. At this stage, 羅 was read *laj and was not yet
appropriate for transcribing foreign la.

斯羅 *sie la postdates the shift of *-a to *-ɔ
and the shift of *-aj to *-a. At this stage, 盧 was read
*lɔ and was no longer appropriate for transcribing
foreign la.

At neither stage did Late Old Chinese have a syllable *sio.
Sio, er, so what if 斯盧 ~ 斯羅 were attempts to write an Old
Korean *sjola? Or - now it occurs to me - *søla?
(But nothing else indicates Old Korean had front rounded vowels.) The
Jurchen/Manchu and Mongolian names for Korea could be based on *sjola
with the simplification of *sj- to s- to fit their
phonotactics. Then later Old Korean shifted *jo (or *ø?)
to *e.

That idea generates more problems, though.

First, how can Middle Korean sjó 'cow' exist if *jo
became *e? sjó would have to come from something other than *sjo
in Old Korean: e.g., *siro with an *-r- blocking the
fusion of *i-o into *e.
But there is no evidence for a disyllabic early word for 'cow'. The
earliest attestation of a Koreanic word for 'cow' is as 首 in the
sinographic spelling of a Koguryo toponym.首 was read as *ɕuʔ in
Late Old Chinese which lacked *sju or *sjo, so 首 might
have been a viable phonogram for a North Koreanic *sjo.

Second, if the Koreanic word had *ø, that vowel should
correspond to Mongolian ö, not the o in solangqa-s.

My guess is that the Jurchen/Manchu and Mongolian names for Korea
are borrowings from a North Koreanic *sjola or the like which
differed as much from Shilla *sela as Polish Lwów
[lvuf] differs from Ukrainian Львів [lʲʋiw] 'Lvov' (But are there any
other cases of northern *jo : southern *e?) 'Old
Korean' or 'early Koreanic' or whatever we call it must have been as
diverse as Slavic or perhaps even Romance are today.

The same must have been true of the Chinese of the time; the
reconstructions here are generic without the regional flavoring that
must have existed. It would be great to see an update of Paul LM Serruys'
1959 study of the 方言 Fangyan
'Regional Words'.

1. I've been meaning to post this since 2.7: I wonder if <so>
orignated as a Parhae script cognate of Chinese 牛 <COW>. What if
that cognate were used to write a North Koreanic cognate of Middle
Korean syó? Then in turn this logogram for a North Koreanic
word was then recycled as a phonogram for Jurchen so. (Although
Jin Qizong [1984: 185] glossed this graph as 'yellow', it appears in
spellings for various unrelated so-words, so it may just be a
phonogram.)

2. Anthony Burgess wrote and slept in a Dormobile.
Nice portmanteau word. Is there a Chinese equivalent of portmanteau
words? Imagine the possibilities in hangul or the Khitan small script.

3. LOL, best use
of the button choice meme I've seen yet by noealz (via Jay Lim via Gerry
Bevers). Knowing which words are Sino-Korean helps a lot in
remembering which words are spelled with ㅐ ae and which ones
have ㅔ e: there are hardly any Sino-Korean morphemes with -e:
the only one that immediately comes to mind is 揭 ke. And
knowing the etymologies of native words helps: e.g., 내- nae-
'to put out' is
from 나 na- 'to come out' + the causative suffix -이- -i-.
But that won't help with monomorphemic 개 kae
'dog' and 게 ke 'crab' which can't be broken down any further.

"Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still
important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the
1990s)"

When I first started learning Korean in 1987, I saw mixed-script
texts and figured I'd better start learning Chinese character readings
right away. I added Sino-Korean readings in pencil to my copy of
Nelson's The
Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary
(still in print after 57 years, and for good reason!). Now I hardly see
Chinese characters in current Korean texts: e.g., on dongA.com's front
page I only see

中文 'Chinese writing' (top of page) and 中國語 'Chinese language'
(bottom of page) for the
Chinese-language edition; the latter is a Korean word Chunggugŏ
which shouldn't be used to indicate a Chinese edition for Chinese
readers

日文 'Japanese writing' (top of page) and 日本語 'Japanese language'
(bottom of page) for the
Japanese-language edition; the latter is a Chinese word which
shouldn't be used to indicate a Japanese edition for Japanese readers

前 chŏn 'previous': without characters could be
interpreted as 'Commander Chŏn'.

5. TIL about the first Cherokee script (and first Native
American-language) newspaper, the ᏣᎳᎩ ᏧᎴᎯᏌᏅᎯ <tsa.la.gi
tsu.le.hi.sa.nv.hi> Cherokee Phoenix,
which was first published 191 years ago today. It appropriately came
back to life in modern times.

7. I guessed that 'railroad' in Manchu would be a calque of Chinese
鐵道 'iron road', and voila:
sele-i jugūn 'iron-GEN road' for 鐵路 'railroad' (lit. 'iron
road'; close enough).

8. It is tempting to try to link Manchu sele to Korean 쇠 soe
< Middle Korean sóy 'iron', but

- the vowels are too different (e is higher class and
nonlabial, whereas o is lower class and labial)

- if sóy were from a Proto-Korean disyllable, its Middle
Korean form should have rising pitch rather than a high pitch: †sǒy
< *sòrí with a low pitch syllable followed by
a high pitch syllable

- if I understand Vovin
(2017) correctly, if there ever were a lost liquid in 'iron', it
would have to be *-r-, not *-l-, and Jurchen/Manchu
retain an r/l-distinction lost in Korean, so sele
cannot be from *sere

The first word is just another spelling of -saṅgaṇaka-
'computer'. Hindi drops the final -a
of Sanskrit-based forms. (I hesitate to say 'loanword' here, since I
suspect the word was coined out of Sanskrit for Hindi before being used
in Sanskrit. I can't imagine a Sanskrit neologism for 'computer'
predating a Hindi term.)

The second word is puzzling. yāntrikī is the feminine of
'relating to instruments (yantra)'. But what
is abhi- doing? It is hard to translate. Monier-Williams'
definition:

(a prefix to verbs and nouns, expressing) to, towards, into,
over, upon. (As a prefix to verbs of motion) it expresses the notion or
going towards, approaching, &c (As a prefix to nouns not derived
from verbs) it expresses superiority, intensity, &c

Does it correspond to the en- of engineering? At
first I thought the word was derived from a verb abhi-√yam
in which abhi- was an idiomatic prefix, but there is no such
verb.

How I wish there were Buddhist texts in Khitan. Something other than
funerary texts. But I fear written Khitan was never a vehicle for
Buddhism. Spoken Khitan, however ... oh, to hear a conversation about
Buddhism in Khitan!

13. Does the South Hamgyŏng dialect of Korean preserve pre-vowel
harmony
vocalism? E.g., is manjŏ 'ahead' (mixing the lower vowel a
with the higher vowel ŏ) more conservative than Seoul mŏnjŏ?
See Ramsey (1978: 61) for more examples of South Hamgyŏng a
corresponding to Seoul ŏ.

14. Why do Jurchen

<sol.go> 'Korea' (cf. Manchu solho 'id.')

and Middle Mongolian 莎郎中合思 solangqa-s 'Koreans'
have -o- in the first syllable if they are based on Old
Korean *sela (transcribed in Late Old Chinese as 斯盧 ~ 斯羅; later
respelled as 新羅 <sin.la> - now read Shilla)
with *-e-?
The Jurchen/Manchu forms made me think the labiality of some suffix
spread into the first syllable, but there is no labiality in the
noninitial syllables of the Middle Mongolian form.

¹2.24.15:08: Although it's tempting to regard sam-
and com- as cognates, Proto-Indo-European *kóm
should have become Sanskrit śam, not sam.

1. I would expect 'rat' to be †singger since the
Manchu word is singgeri, and Jurchen mudur'dragon'
corresponds to Manchu muduri 'id'. But the second graph
is <ge>, not <ger>.

The first looks like Chinese 利 'profit' which was read *li
in Jin Chinese. But other versions of it look less like 利:

I don't know why Jin Qizong reconstructed its reading as ʃïn
with a nonfront ï (IPA [ɨ] or [ɯ]?). Was he influenced by the
nonfront vowel in the modern Mandarin pronunciation shen [ʂən]
of the character 申 used to transcribe sing-?

If one believed that Jurchen had frontness harmony, the e in
the second syllable should go with a front vowel i in the first
syllable, not ï.

On the other hand, I think Jurchen had height harmony, and the
higher series vowel i is what I expect to go with e
[ə], the higher series counterpart of a. If i had a
lower series vowel, that would have been ī [ɪ] which would not
coexist with the higher series vowel e [ə] within a root.

Lastly, the *ʂ- of the Ming Chinese transcription 申 *ʂin
reflects a Jurchen s- [ɕ] that is more likely to have
palatalized before a high front vowel i than a nonfront ï
or a less high ī [ɪ].

2.23.11:13: Jurchen s-, like Korean or Japanese /s/,
palatalizes before /i/.

In September 1961 we all arrived in England, which somewhat
reminded us of India. I recall one day David invited us to lunch at
Claridge’s, where he was staying. He led us into the hotel garden and
on the lawn beside the swimming pool gave us exercise books and pencils
and began teaching us the Roman alphabet.

Before starting the journey to the West, we spent a few weeks
together in the frontier town of Kalimpong, in British times the
beginning of the old route from India into Central Tibet, then easily
reached by rail from Calcutta where we would start our air-journey to
Europe. Here I started some lessons in English and in world-geography
and bought them all European style clothes, which they wanted to have
so as not to be so conspicuous in there new setting.

Kman is usually considered a Tibeto-Burman language, part of
the ‘North Assam’ group, a characterisation which goes back to Konow
(1902). However, there is no published argument defending this
classification andBlench & Post (2013) consider it equally likely
to be a language isolate.

10. I had no idea Anthony
Burgess had such a rich linguistic background: e.g.,

Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written,
achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the
Colonial Office. He was rewarded with a salary increase for his
proficiency in the language.

[...]

During his years in Malaya, and after he had mastered Jawi, the
Arabic script adapted for Malay, Burgess taught himself the Persian
language, after which he produced a translation of Eliot's The Waste
Land into Persian (unpublished).

1. The Jurchen logogram <PIG> is clearly cognate to the Khitan
large script logogram

<PIG>

but neither seems to have any cognate Chinese character unless I put
on my pareidolia
glasses and see a resemblance to 亥 'pig (in the 12-animal cycle)'.

I have shown the late form of the character from the vocabulary of
the Bureau of Translators (#162; early 1400s?). Interestingly the
earlier form of the character from the 進士 jinshi
candidate monument (1224)

looks less like the Khitan form. Unfortunately, the
character is not in what remains of the Jurchen Character Book
thought to contain the earliest forms of characters.

2.22.: THEORY HERE

2. Shimunek (2017: 45) reads the Old Mandarin transcription of a
Khitan river name as *niawlaka. He regards the Chinese
transcription of a Serbi river name as a cognate *ñawlag.

He rejects attempts to connect the river name to Khitan

<n.i.gu> 'gold';

the words are too dissimilar. Instead he sees a possible link to *ñaw
'lake'.

One problem is that *a had shifted to *o in Old
Mandarin, so was read *niawloko. In an earlier
period, those graphs would have been read as *niawlaka,
but in that period, a final *-g would have been transcribed as *-k
(as in the Serbi hydronym's transcription), whereas Old Mandarin lacked
final stops, necessitating a whole syllable *-ko to transcribe
foreign *-g.

I think that *-g may have been uvular *-ɢ or *-ʁ
to harmonize with *a.

3. Shimunek (2017: 44) regards the transcriptions of an ethnonym
that Pulleyblank (1983) reconstructed as *tägräg
as "further evidence in support of Beckwith's (2007a) of dialectal
variation between coda *g and *ŋ in northern frontier varieties of Old
Chinese and Early Middle Chinese."

Transcription

丁零

鐵勒

敕勒

狄歷

特勒

Shimunek

*tɛyŋ liayŋ

*tʰɛr (< Beckwith's *tʰêk) lək

*ṭʰik lək

-

-

This site

*teŋ leŋ

*tʰe(ik/t/r) lək

*ʈʰɨək lək

*dek lek

*dək lək

(2.20.1:15: The last two columns are my additions.)

I don't think such variation is necessary. *-k and *-ŋ
are simply two different strategies to transcribe foreign *-g.
There is no need to project *-g into Chinese.

Wikipedia avoids the issue of what the ethnonym was at the time by
taking the easy (though anachronistic) option of reading 丁零 in standard
Mandarin as Dingling,
鐵勒 as Tiele, etc.

4. Vovin
(2003: 97) proposed that Cheju 굴레 kulle
'mouth' "is likely to be connected with Japonic *kutu-
'mouth'." He repeats this proposal on p. 24 in the section on a
possible Japonic substratum of Cheju in his 2009 book.

Three apparent problems: If the Proto-Japonic word for 'mouth' was *kotu-i:

1. Cheju has -u- instead of -o-

(Japonic *o raised to *-u- in Pelagic Japonic
but not Peninsular Japonic)

2. Cheju has -ll- instead of †-l- which is the
expected reflex of intervocalic *-t-

3. Cheju has -e instead of -wi

But Cheju historical phonology seems like unexplored territory and
my Proto-Japonic form could be wrong, so maybe the gaps can be bridged.

And Vovin (2009: 25) thinks 耽牟羅 Thammora has "a transparent
Japonic etymology": it is either cognate to Japanese tani
'valley' + mura 'village' or Japanese tami 'folk' + mura
'village'.

耽 Tham could reflect a reduction of *tani- to *tam-
before *m-.

牟 was read as *mu 'moo' in mainstream Old and Midlde
Chinese. But the Sino-Korean reading 모 mo may indicate an
eastern dialect with *mo for 'moo', as there was no *u
to *o shift in Korean. 牟
represented a word for 'to moo' (as well as various homophones: see
Karlgren [1957: 285] and Schuessler [2009: 184]), and such an
onomatopoetic word might plausibly have vocalic variation. If 牟羅 was
read *mora as in modern Sino-Korean, it could be evidence for a
Proto-Japonic *mora 'village' whose *o raised to u
in Japan but not on Cheju.

6a. The translation gets off to a bad start, mentioning a "Ying
Prefecture" not in the actual text. The
Japanese translation
has similar problems; it starts with 瀛州 'Ying Prefecture'. (Or Yŏng if
one prefers to read it in Korean rather than Mandarin. Both readings
are anachronistic.)

6b. Conversely, the translation ignores a lot before the mention of
the first god
良乙那.

6c. It would be lazy and anachronistic to read 良乙那 with Sino-Korean
readings as ryang + ŭl + na. 乙 is probably a
phonogram for *r (Vovin ). 良 is a problem. Did it transcribe a
syllable beginning with *r-
which would be unusual in initial position in an Altaic language (but
see here)? Or did it transcribe a syllable beginning with an *l-
(cf. its Middle Chinese reading *l) which is possible in Altaic
but unusual for Koreanic?

2.20.1:51: Burling, last seen here,
gave me
my first introduction to
Lolo-Burmese via the data in his 1967 book
which I used to write my own
reconstruction. I just realized he used Robert B. Jones' Karen data in
the same way for his book Proto-Karen:
A Reanalysis (1969)!

1. I've now been doing this Jurchen calendar shtick long enough to
recycle the colors (red last came up on
the 9th). Here's the whole cycle:

blue/green > red > yellow > white > black (and back to
green again)

Soon I'll be recycling the animals and won't have to make the
occasional new character image from Jason Glavy's font anymore. Yay! (I
love his font; I just don't love the inconvenience of creating an image
for every character I want to display.)

1a. Jin Qizong (1984: 235) derived <RED> from Chinese 金
<GOLD>
(not <RED>!). 金 cannot be a phonetic loan, as it did not sound
anything
like fulgiyan; its Jin dynasty reading was *kim. (I
don't agree with Shimunek [2017: 106-108] on the absence of *-m
in Jin Chinese; I should go into why later.)

The Khitan large script character

<RED>

looks nothing like the
Jurchen character or Chinese 金 <GOLD>. I thought it might be
related to Chinese 赤 <RED>, but that
character has no similar variants. And to complicate matters
further, Liu and Wang (2004: 23, #84) read this character as a
transcription of Liao Chinese 金 *kim 'gold'!

A problem for the ex Khitanis
hypothesis of the origin of the Jurchen script
is why the Jurchen chose to copy the script of their "worst enemies"
(as Janhunen [1994: 7] put it) in some instances but not others. As
Janhunen asked, why didn't they just adopt the Chinese script or the
simpler Khitan small script? Why seemingly modify the more complex
Khitan large script at random? My view and his is that they did not do
that; rather, they adapted the Parhae script, which, as Vovin (2012)
demonstrated, predates the Khitan scripts. According to this ex
Parhis hypothesis, the Khitan and Jurchen large scripts are
sister derivatives
of the Parhae script rather than a random deformation of the Chinese
script and a derivative of that deformation.

as
<qai> and translates it as 'a discourse deictic demonstrative'
borrowed from and corresponding to (Jin) Chinese 該 *kaj
(my reconstruction) in the bilingual Sino-Khitan Langjun inscription.
But I don't see 該 in the Chinese text. That loan proposal is
phonologically interesting for reasons I should go into later.

Glynne Walley's courses show a lot of breadth - I guessed correctly
that manga would be one topic, but he's done much more spanning the
last millennium, going beyond the written word into rakugo, noh, and
kyōgen (the latter two in a course with the great title "Monkey Fun").

I once thought I was going to be a Japanese literature scholar, but
as you can obviously tell from this blog, I took a big detour and never
turned back.

I love parallel texts; my favorite is the Korean-English edition of
全光鏞 Chŏn Kwang-yong's 꺼삐딴 리 Kkŏppittan Ri (Kapitan Ri, 1962)
translated by the late Prof. Marshall R.
Pihl¹ who was my Middle Korean
teacher. I just bought the
book on Kindle; it's one of the few stories I've read that has
stayed with me for three decades. Disappointingly
the Kindle version lacks the Korean text which is in the print edition.
At least Prof. Pihl's biography appears in both Korean and English, as
does editor Bruce Fulton's - but Chŏn's own biography is only in
English!

In the story "Kapitan Lee," by Chon Kwangyong, the struggle to
improve one's fortune seems to have taken precedence over loyalty to
family or nation. The protagonist -- Dr. Yi Inguk, alias Kapitan Lee --
constantly strives to amass wealth and protect himself even at the
expense of his fellow countrymen. As he refuses to treat patients who
are unlikely to pay his fees, most of his clients are Japanese before
liberation and members of "the moneyed class" after 1945.

Dr. Yi is divided in his loyalties, and that would all depend
on who is in control. He served the oppressor during Japanese rule, and
when the U.S. is the overlord, he donates a national treasure to the
consul's collection without the slightest sense of guilt. Editor
[Peter H.] Lee
compares the physician to a chameleon, changing his colors to match the
world which surrounds him, no matter how servile his efforts are.

I think Peter
H. Lee
was the translator of that edition. I agree with Gerry Bevers; it's a
shame Prof. Lee doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. In lieu of an entry, I
recommend Bevers'
page on him, including his own memories of the man. Is Prof. Lee
still alive? I also recommend Bevers' entire site, Korean Language Notes.

After all these years I finally figured out that 꺼삐딴 Kkŏppittan
in the title is based on the pronunciation rather than the spelling of
Russian капитан
<kapitan> [kəpʲɪˈtan]. Until now I had been expecting a
transliteration-like rendering of the word as 까삐딴 Kkappittan.
The Russian word has been transliterated in the English
translations of Kkŏppittan Ri; if it weren't, the name would be
something like †Cuppitan with -u- as an attempt to
indicate [ə]. (See A Clockwork Orange for other examples of
Russian in English 'phonetic' spelling: e.g., gulliver for голова
<golova> [ɡəlɐˈva] 'head'. It just occurred to me that Chinese
transcriptions of foreign names are like gulliver: attempts to
approximate foreign names using preexisting elements - though in the
case of gulliver, the preexisting element is the trisyllabic
name Gulliver rather than a syllable.)

The real surprise is bō for 吠 which is normally read ho-
in hoeru < poyu.

2.19.1:09: I tried to come up with a derivation for the name, but it
doesn't work:

*inu-nə poyu-ru saki > Inubōsaki

'dog-GEN bark-ATTR cape' = 'cape where a dog barks'

There are two problems:

First, although *nə-p > *Np > *Nb
> b is possible, the genitive marker nə in a
subordinate clause should not be reduced to N, at least not in
Western Old Japanese. But maybe the name originates from a different
dialect.

Second, neither premodern -oyuru nor modern -oeru
can compress to -ō, unless one posits an ad hoc
development in the source dialect.

I would expect bō to be from an earlier *nə-popu or *nə-papu.
There was no verb †popu, but there is a papu which
became modern 這う hau 'to crawl'. It seems then that the name is
from

*inu-nə pap-u saki > Inubōsaki

'dog-GEN crawl-ATTR cape' = 'cape where a dog crawls'

without any ad hoc compression (apart from the unexpected
reduction of *nə). The name could theoretically be
written as †犬這埼 'dog-crawl-', but 吠 'howl' is semantically preferable
to 這 'crawl'.

2.19.0:38: I didn't realize 犬吠埼 Inubōsaki contains the animal for
this entry until the start of the next day, the day of the red pig!

2.20.23:05: The absence of 𘤃 'grass'
(herbal medicine?) in those characters makes me wonder if 1vyq3
and 2jeq2 were not 'medicine men' unlike the other two words
I've mentioned so far:

𗄤 4536 2ror4 < *Cɯ.roH
'wizard, witch,
sorcerer'

𗄥 4550 1lheq4 < *Sɯ-ɬe
or *Sɯ-ɬaŋ 'wizard, sorcerer'

Is the shared *S- in three out of the four words so far
significant?

I wouldn't take the slight differences in the definitions from Li
Fanwen (2008) too seriously. Ditto for the Chinese definitions I
haven't quoted. I suspect neither the English nor the Tangut captures
the true differences between the words. Which is not Li's fault - there
is nothing to go on but the brief, circular definitions from the Tangut
dictionary tradition which define them in terms of each other.

I'm glad these words have survived at all; a wealth of pre-Buddhist
Khitan and Jurchen - and Pyu! - vocabulary has probably vanished
without a trace. But who knows what lurks among the undefined words in
extant Khitan and Pyu texts?

1. The Jurchen logogram <CHICKEN> might be related to the Khitan
large script character

<CHICKEN>

but the resemblance is vague at best.

The Jurchen and Khitan words may also be related somehow - the small
script spelling of the Khitan word

tells us that 'chicken' was something like t-Qa, but there
is no agreement on what was between the t- and -a. The
latest reconstruction I've seen is Shimunek's (2017: 372) taqa
<t.aq.a>.

The vocabularies of the Bureau of Translators and
Interpreters have different transcriptions of the second syllable of
'chicken': 和 *xo (BoT #152) and 課 *kʰo (BoI
#332, #424). The Chinese forms are only approximate, but there is no
doubt that one had an initial fricative and the other had a stop.

Vovin
(1997: 274) proposed that Jurchen/Manchu intervocalic *-k-
became -h-, Other Tungusic forms for 'chicken' point to a
medial stop. So it seems then that Jurchen tiqo [tɪqʰɔ] in the
later Bureau of Interpreters vocabulary is from a conservative dialect
that didn't lenite *-k-, whereas the earlier Bureau of
Translators form tiho [tɪχɔ] is from an innovative dialect that
did. There is no evidence for a nasal that would have blocked lenition:
*-nk- > -k-.

Manchu coko [tʂʰɔqʰɔ] may be a borrowing from a conservative
dialect preserving a medial stop. The first vowel of the Manchu form
seems to have assimilated to the second vowel.

2.19.19.24: Wu and Janhunen (2010: 260) noted the similarity of
Khitan small script character 39

with the modern simplified Chinese character 开 kai which in
turn also happens to resemble Jurchen <CHICKEN>. Since 雞
'chicken' in Middle Chinese was *kej (something like *kaj
in the south - far from the Jurchen!), it is tempting to come up with a
pseudoexplanation for the Jurchen graph: tiko was written as a
variant of 开 which almost sounded like 雞 'chicken'. But that
would be anachronistic.

As far as I know, no one has proposed a reading for 39. The
diacritic <ˀ> in Kane's (2009: 301) <kải> indicates that
it is a placeholder transliteration chosen purely for visual similarity
with 开 kai; it is not meant to indicate that Kane thinks 39 was
pronounced kai.

39 probably did not stand for a single segment. It is only attested
twice in the corpus in Research on the Khitan Small Script
(1985): once in the epitaph for Empress 宣懿 Xuanyi (18.10.1) and once in
the epitaph for the 許王 Prince of Xu (39.9.2). It occurs just once in
the epitaph for Xiao Dilu (45.4). It is in initial positon before

<is>

in Xuanyi and Dilu and before

<as>

in Xu. Could its reading end in a consonant? Or in i if
<as> is an error for <is>?

2. It took me thirty years to figure out that the Korean honorific
nominative/ablative particle kkesŏ is an example of double
indirectness
as politeness. That explains why it is both nominative and ablative
(not a combination I'm used to from an Indo-European perspective):

- kəkɯj 'to that place' contains the dative-allative
marker -ɯj 'to', so presumably kək was once a noun
'place' - but how did the -ŋ- ~ -k- variation come
about? Vovin (2003:
96, 2009: 96 [on the same page in two different publications!])
proposed that Middle Korean intervocalic -k- is from
Proto-Korean *-nk-. Two possibilities:

- the demonstratives used to have a final *-n (related
to the realis attributive -n?) that was reanalzyed as part of
the following word: *kɯn + kəkɯj > kɯ +
ŋəkɯj (with irregular fusion of *-nk- to ŋ- in that
phrase but regular fusion to -k- in kəkɯj?)

- the original word for 'place' was disyllabic nVkək,
reduced to ŋək ~ kək

Martin (1992: 577) analyzed Middle Korean iŋəkɯj 'to this
place' as i-ŋək-ɯj. There is no doubt that i is 'this'
and ɯj is 'to', but initial ŋ- is odd in a native word.

4. David Boxenhorn asked me about Altaic vowel harmony.
I don't have time to say much, but I can type a few introductory
remarks here.

Altaic can be thought of as a continuum of five families in contact
from east to west:

West: front harmony

Central red
zone: height harmony

East: no vowel harmony

Turkic

Serbi-Mongolic

Tungusic

Koreanic

Japonic

Turkic has frontness harmony like Uralic languages to the west:

Languages in what I call the red zone (after their shared
word for 'red') have height harmony:

I believe Old Chinese and possibly also Tangut went through a height
harmony phase influenced by Altaic neighbors.

Japonic has no vowel harmony beyond Arisaka's law: a tendency
against having *ə coexist with *a, *o, or *u
within a root. See section 7.1.1.3 of this
file by Bjarke Frellesvig (who writes *ə as *o and *o
as *wo). In Japonic, there are no sets of harmonizing
affixes like those in other Altaic languages.

Wikipedia led me to Yoshida
(2006) on i becoming e to assimilate to an e
in the same word in modern Kyoto Japanese, but that is not like any
other form of Altaic vowel harmony.

6. Robbins
Burling in Proto-Karen: A Reanalysis (1969: 12) used
phonostatistical arguments against Robert B. Jones'
(1961: 100) reconstruction of twelve final
nonglottal stops in Proto-Karen. (Compare with Proto-Karen's relative
Old Burmese which only had four final stops: -k, -c,
-t, -p; -c was ultimately secondary. Pyu had only three final
stops: -k, -t, -p.) All appear only 1-3 times in Jones'
reconstruction and are hence suspicious.

When I encounter rarities in Pyu, I note them and file them away
instead of immediately granting them phonemic status.

Looking at Burling's (1969: 30-31) own reconstruction, I see
asymmetries in his rhymes that I want to explore later.

The tones fall readily into 6 major correspondence patterns.
Little phonetic sense can be made of these correspondences. A high
rising tone in one language may correspond regularly with a low falling
tone in another, and in some cases even checked tones in one language
correspond to smooth tones in others. Nevertheless, since the number of
tones is small, and the number of examples of each is large, the
correspondences hardly seem questionable.

My first encounter with this phenomenon was when I first read about
Cantonese in 1990. I was accustomed to standard Mandarin, whose tones
correspond with those of Cantonese as follows in sonorant-final
syllables (*stop-final 'checked' syllables are complicated):

10. Sort of answering my own question,
I finally got around to hearing Rihanna's pronunciation of care
at about :31 in "Work".
It sounds like [kjɛɹ] to me. "Sort of" because I don't know how
representative that pronunciation is.

tonight. I'll just say that it has a near-mirror image
(near-?)synonym

𗄥 4550 1lheq4 'id.'

with 𘤃 'grass' (herbal medicine?) and 𘤧 'small' (referring to the size of the herbs?)
in opposite places under 𘠋 '?' and
stop there for now.

13. Shimunek (2017: 218) reconstructed Khitan

'was caused to serve' (Shimunek's translation)

as [r̩lgər] which is doubly un-Altaic: Altaic languages do not have
native words with r-
(Khitan may prove that to be a myth) or syllabic liquids. Typology
aside, there is
nothing phonetically implausible about his proposal. However, others
would
read that word very differently: e.g.,

1. I originally wrote 'green' and 'monkey' as nongiyan and monon
more or less following Jin Qizong (1984), but then I realized that Ming
Chinese 嫩 *nun in their transcriptions was the only possible
way to write Jurchen [ɲɔn] in sinography since there are no characters
for *ɲon, *ɲun, etc. The Manchu cognates niowanggiyan
'green' and monio/bonio 'monkey' with nio
[ɲɔ] confirm a palatal nasal [ɲ]. It would be unlikely for n to
become [ɲ] before a nonpalatal vowel [ɔ].

2.17.19:43: The vocabularies of the Bureau of Translators and
Interpreters have different transcriptions of the first syllable of
'monkey': 卜 *pu (BoT #152) and 莫 *mo (BoI #332, #424).
This parallels the b [p] ~ m variation in Manchu. Anna
Dybo's Tungusic dictionary regards the m- as secondary. The
m- may be due to assimilation with the following -n-:
cf. the b- ~ m- alternation in the paradigm of Manchu
'I':

Take the Beatles for example; a band who were masters in vocal
shape-shifting, and picked up traits from their fans across the
Atlantic during the height of Beatlemania in the US. In You Say
Potato: A Book About Accents, authors
David and Ben Crystal note the impact of the Beatles’ fluctuating
tones. Citing a report by Peter Trudgill in 1980, which examined the
way in which the Beatles sounded out the r after a vowel, something
most American singers would do, they wrote:

"In 1963/64, in such songs as Please Please Me, almost 50% of the words
containing this feature had the r sounded. By the time of the Sergeant
Pepper album in 1967, this had fallen to less than 5%. Note that the
use of the feature was never totally consistent. That’s normal. When
singers copy Americans, they get the accent sometimes right, sometimes
wrong. But over the years, the Beatles' singing voices show that they
are leaving the mid-Atlantic way behind and starting to sound more
consistently British."

That made me wonder if exceptions to sound changes are cases of
incomplete imitation.

Li only mentions attestations in dictionaries. So 2ror4 may
be a so-called 'ritual language' word or, in my view, a
non-Sino-Tibetan substratum word. The Mixed Categories volume
of the Tangraphic Sea mentions several possible
(near-)synonyms. I'll look at them tomorrow.

On the other hand, the Mongolist György Kara (2005: 187) only
mentions an "ephemeral attempt" at a Latin alphabet for Mongolia
"launched by Choibalsan
in 1940".

(2.18.13:40: No, wait, his timeline [p.197] says there was an
experimental alphabet for Khalkha in the "early 1930s". No mention of
the specific date 1931 or of a new alphabet in 1939. He gives 1945 as
the date of the introduction of Cyrillic for Khalkha.)

South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of Hanja in
1971, although they are still taught as part of the mandatory
curriculum in 6th grade. They are taught in separate courses in South
Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language
curriculum. Formal Hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high
school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade
12.

So are hanja taught in sixth grade or not? The first sentence tells
me 'yes'; the last sentence tells me 'no'.

1a. The Jurchen character <saha> is only attested in the
vocabulary of the Bureau of
Interpreters (#481, #620), but its shape goes back centuries.

Jin Qizong (1984: 93) observed that there is an identical character
in the Khitan large script from a remnant of a memorial from the
mausoleum of Emperor Taizu of Liao (r. 916-926). Could that memorial
date from the mid-to-late 920s: i.e., only a few years after the
'creation' (whatever that really meant) of the Khitan large script?

As the Khitan large script character for 'black'

is somewhat (though not entirely) different, my guess is that the
Jurchen character may be a recycling of a Khitan large script character
pronounced saqa (Shimunek [2017: 213] did not reconstruct x
or h for Khitan). That character in turn might be derived from
a Parhae prototype that was either pronounced similarly or represented
an unrelated Parhae (North Koreanic?) morpheme with a meaning similar
to whatever Khitan saqa might have meant.

Another possibility is that

were variants of <BLACK> in the Khitan large script. But they
might be too different to be variants.

I am hesitant to transliterate

as a logogram <BLACK> because it is also attested in the verb
stem

sahada- 'to hunt' (#481); cf. Manchu sahada- 'id.'.

Could that spelling be <HUNT.da> which at some earlier point ?
Did the Jurchen originally write 'to hunt' as a single logogram
<HUNT>? Was sahaliya then spelled <HUNT.liya> with
<HUNT> used as a phonogram for saha-? Perhaps

represented a Khitan root 'to hunt' in the Khitan large script. If
so, I cannot think of any plausible cognate Chinese character, though
with pareidolia,
one can see a 'covered cross' on the right side
of 狩 'to hunt'.

1b. Jin Qizong (1984: 296) observed that <liyan> has a
near-lookalike in the epitaph for Xiao Xiaozhong 蕭孝忠 (1089):

Was that character also read something like liyan? Might the
character be from a Parhae graphic cognate of Chinese 亮 or the right
side of Chinese 涼? Both 亮 and 涼 would have been pronounced something
like *ljaŋ in the northeastern Chinese known to the Parhae (cf.
their Sino-Korean reading 량 ryang).

1c. Jin Qizong (1984: 11, 12) found a different form of
<SHEEP> in the Jurchen Character Book thought to date
from the early Jin dynasty. I presume he identified its meaning on the
basis of context (e.g., being surrounded by other animal date terms in
sequence?) since the Book is monolingual. He writes this Jin
form of <SHEEP> in three different ways in his dictionary:

As I do not have a clear copy of the Book, I do not know
which form is attested in it. (Maybe two or more are if the character
appears more than once.)

The last form is the closest to Khitan <SHEEP>, though the top
elements (ヒ and ユ) are oriented in opposite directions:

- "have added restrictions which shorten long vowels in
pre-(ante-)penultimate word position and/or on head nouns and verbs
that are not final in their XP"

- "have lost the [vowel length] contrast but have added
phrase-level penultimate lengthening"

Why would vowels shorten in pre-(ante-)penultimate position? Or
lengthen in penultimate position?

Those which have "new long vowels (e.g. from the loss of an
intervocalic consonant flanked by identical vowels)" are like
Mongolian: e.g., the city name Улаанбаатар Ulaanbaatar
< *hulagan 'red' + *bagatur 'hero' (the
1924 collocation is obviously of Communist origin and hence cannot be
reconstructed at the proto-level).

2b. I wonder what Hyman would say about Pulleyblank's (1962: 99) and
Starostin's (1989) theories of vowel length and Chinese vocalic
development in what Sagart (1999) called 'type A' and 'type B'
syllables. Four proposals on type B syllables:

Pulleyblank: Old Chinese *Vː > Middle Chinese *jV..

Starostin, OTOH, had the reverse idea: Old Chinese short *V
> Middle Chinese *jV. (This is a simplification.)

In the Baxter-Sagart system, Old Chinese *V before
nonpharyngeal consonants > Middle Chinese jV (their j
is a notational device).

In my system, (1) *high vowels not preceded by high vowels and (2)
*low vowels preceded by high vowels > Middle Chinese high
vowel-initial diphthongs.

Baxter and Sagart's Middle Chinese notation is not starred since it
is not phonetic. Their -ji- is a spelling device to indicate
Grade IV chongniu status. I don't know how they think -jie
was pronounced.

If I wrote Middle Chinese the way I write Tangut and Tangut period
northwestern Chinese, I would write *Cie as Ce4 with 4
for Grade IV. I have considered writing such a notation for Middle
Chinese to avoid getting bogged down in phonetic trivia.

3. Two things struck me as I was looking at Shimunek's (2017:
215-217) reconstruction of Middle Khitan vowels.

3a. His Middle Khitan vowel inventory is front-heavy unlike the
Mongolic, Jurchen/Manchu, or early Korean systems:

Shimunek's Middle Khitan (3 front vowels)

i

u

ɪ

ɛ

ə

ɔ

a

He respectively places *ɛ and *ʊ higher and lower than I would expect.
*ʊ is similarly high in the next table.

Shimunek's Common Serbi-Mongolic (2 front vowels)

*i

*u

*ɪ

*ə

*o

*ʊ

*ɔ

*a

Proto-Mongolic (1 front vowel)

*i

*u

*ə

*o

*ʊ

*ɔ

*a

Ming Jurchen in the Sino-Jurchen vocabularies (1 front vowel;
note the similarity to the Middle Khitan inventory except for the front
vowels)

Early Korean (1-2 front vowels; in a more phonetic notation
than usual to facilitate comparison with Shimunek's systems)

*i

*u

*ə

(*ɛ)

*ɔ

*a

So far nobody else believes in my *ɛ. I'll live.

(Tables added 2.16.0:16.)

3b. Another surprise from a Mongolic/Jurchen/Manchu/Korean
perspective is that his Middle Khitan a and ə belong to
the same vowel harmony category, whereas they are typically in opposing
categories. Contrast:

Vowel harmony is breaking down in the spoken Korean 'infinitive': pad-a
may be pronounced (but never spelled!) pad-ŏ
(which is heard "increasingly in Seoul today" [Lee and Ramsey 2011:
296]).

I think nar-ən is also a case of vowel harmony
breakdown possibily facilitated by a lack of stress on suffixes. Kane
(2009: 132) gives examples of a-nouns followed by a genitive
written <an>. However, Kane does not give examples of the type ...
aC-an; all the stems in his examples end in -a, so, for
instance,

<qa.gha.an> 'of the qaghan'

might have simply been [qaʁan] rather than [qaʁaːn]. Perhaps a-final
nouns took -n and aC-final nouns took -ən.

I can't believe I started the day thinking I'd never have enough to
fill this entry.

1. I recall that Grinstead (1972) derived the Jurchen character
<HORSE> from Chinese 保 'to protect', which would have been
pronounced *paw (would Pulleyblank have reconstructed *pɔw?)
in Jin Chinese. But why would the Jurchen write an m-word with
a p-character?

Today I realized that <HORSE> might be derived from a Parhae
script graphic cognate of 保 with a para-Japonic (!) reading cognate to
Japanese mor- 'to protect'.

Trudgill (1983) and Simpson (1999) discovered that a range of British
artists of the mid-20th century switched to an ‘American accent’ in
singing (Simpson labels this set of features associated with ‘American
accents’ the “USA-5 model”).

While recording "Come Dancing," Ray was asked to sing in an
"American accent," a request he turned down.

Even the content was thought to be too English for the American
market:

Although Arista Records founder Clive Davis had reservations
about releasing the single in the United States due to the English
subject matter of dance halls, the track saw an American single release
in April 1983.

But the lyrics didn't bother me in Hawaii.

3. I finally realized that Sino-Korean 天動 chhŏndong
'thunder' became 'nativized' as 천둥 chhŏndung to
harmonize the lower series vowel o with the preceding higher
series vowel ŏ.

Korean vowel classes (added 2.16.0:41; ă is obsolete)

higher

i

ŏ

ŭ

u

lower

-

a

(ă)

o

4. A Haiman Tetralogy

Quoting from a grammar that's actually fun to read!

4a. In the Khmer dialect described by Haiman (2011: 1), what he
transcribes as av (ៅ <au> in Khmer script) is
pronounced as [aɯ]. I suspect a similar shift of *-aw > *-aɰ
occurred in Tangut. Eventually this *-aɰ simply became -a.

4b. Haiman (2011: 10):

Leaving this small number of words aside, it is still
remarkable that in a language where almost every two-consonant cluster
is attested word-initially, there are (virtually) no such (glottal stop
+ C) clusters.

I think "every" is too strong for Khmer which has many
constraints on initial clusters: e.g., no clusters starting with
implosives.

I'm reminded of how I thought anything could be in a Pyu consonant
cluster after seeing sequences like kṭl- from inscription 12
and tdl- from inscription 16)
until I actually
collected all the clusters in the corpus and put aside marginal
oddities. Then patterns emerged: e.g., what appeared to be
three-consonant clusters were really sequences of preinitials followed
by initials spelled with two consonants:

kṭl- /k.L̥/

tdl- /t.L/

/L̥ L/ may have been lateral affricates [tɬ dɮ].

2.16.20:11: Whether these mysterious laterals have anything to do
with the laterals sometimes reconstructed for Tangut (e.g., Sofronov
1968 and Tai 2008's ld-) remains to be seen. I have not yet
been able to identify any cognates of Pyu words with /L̥ L/ (or the
similarly enigmatic /R̥ R/ written as ṭr and dr).

4c. Haiman (2011: 19):

Smith (2007: ii) declares the native orthography to be "the
best [transcription of Khmer phonetics] on the planet" and heroically
dispenses with any romanizations in even the initial chapters of his
introductory textbook. No other scholar has followed him in either this
bold assessment or in practice

I haven't seen Smith (2007), but it does seem "bold" to do so, given
that I had to work through 148 pages of Huffman's Cambodian System
of Writing (1970) to learn the
script.

4d. Haiman (2011: 22):

Final <s> may be pronounced [s], in a hypercorrect
reading style: thus nah, written as <nas> can be
pronounced [nas] or [nah]. Otherwise, it is pronounced as [h]

This makes the Khmer borrowing of juif 'Jew' as ជ្វីស
<jvīs>
[cʋih] (hypercorrect [cʋis]) with <s> instead of <ḥ> even
stranger; a nonsibilant [h] seems more like [f] to me than a sibilant
[s].

5. Looking at Roland Emmerick's 2009 sketch of Khotanese, I wondered
where balysa- /balza-/? 'Buddha' came from. (ys in
Khotanese Brahmi stands for non-Indic /z/, a common sound in Iranian
languages.)

6. Today's color is black, and yesterday I
proposed
that the Jurchen
phonogram <he> was from a Parhae script counterpart of Chinese 黑
'black'. In Middle Chinese, was pronounced 黑 *xək (probably
more like *xʌk), yet its Sino-Korean reading is hŭk
[hɯk] with a high vowel. That oddity is not isolated; it is true of
Sino-Korean readings corresponding to Middle Chinese *-ək/*-əŋ
in general. What's
going on?

2.16.2.16: The borrowing of Middle Chinese *-ək/*-əŋ
(*-ʌk/-ʌŋ?)
as Sino-Korean [ɯk]/[ɯŋ] is even more puzzling considering that Korean
once had [ʌk]/[ʌŋ]. The early ('Go-on') layer of Sino-Japanese
presumably borrowed via a Koreanic language (Paekche) has -oku/-ou
< -ək/-əũ
for those Middle Chinese rhymes. (That tells us a bit about how
Sino-Paekche differed from Sino-Shilla which became Sino-Korean.)

7. I was reluctant to propose that Ming Jurchen gulmahun
'hare' and Manchu gūlmahūn 'id.' had acquired their
final syllables by analogy with Ming Jurchen indahun and
Manchu indahūn 'dog', but now here I am mentioning it
after seeing Shimunek (2007: 353)'s similar proposal for Middle Mongol
'snake':

the assimilation model of linguistic expansion.
According to this model, it is not populations that migrate but
languages. When a speech community expands its territory to comprise
areas where other languages are originally spoken, the principal
process is that of linguistic replacement, or language shift, due to
which the new language is, in most cases voluntarily, adopted by
speakers of the former local languages. Empirical experience from
different parts of the world tells us that language shift is by far the
most important mechanism of linguistic expansion. This conclusion has
only been confirmed by recent progress in human genetics.

That is why I like to speak of the coming of Burmese speakers into
the Pyu lands rather than just 'the Burmese'; the latter could imply
that the Pyu were completely replaced by 'the Burmese', whereas it is
more likely that Pyu speakers switched to Burmese. The descendants of
the Pyu are still here, though they don't speak Pyu or identify as Pyu
anymore.

10. I disagree with Pevnov (2012: 17) about the term 'Tungusic':

which in my opinion is incorrect for the following reasns:
first, it would at the very least be strange to consider Jurchen or
Manchu to be Tungusic, and second, following such a logic of
terminological simplification, it would analogically be possible to
replace the term "Indo-European" with "European," "Finno-Ugric" with
"Finnic" or "Ugric" and so forth, although it is unlikely that anyone
would agree with such innovations.

The term Manchu-Tungusic could imply there are only two branches,
Jurchen/Manchu and an 'everything else' branch (which is in fact
Pevnov's view, one he shares with Sunik and Vasilevich). But that may
not be the
case: e.g., on the previous page, Janhunen (2012: 16) posits a
different model in which Jurchenic (Jurchen and Manchu) are a subbranch
of Southern Tungusic:

The term 'Sino-Tibetan' has similar problems - it could imply there
are only two branches, Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman, which I do not think
is the case. But at least Chinese and Tibetan are both well-known
languages that could serve as representatives of the family. The layman
has heard of Manchu but not of 'Tungusic'. Moreoever, there is no
language called 'Tungusic'.

Shimunek's term 'Serbi-Mongolic' also implies there are two (known)
branches, Serbi and Mongolic, and that does seem to be the case. Serbi
is not a well-known language, but at least it was a language
(see Shimunek 2017: 121-168 for details on Middle Serbi).

2.16.21:30: For further reading on naming language families, I
recommend Ostapirat (2000: 18):

We propose to call the whole language stock, to which Kra and
other sister languages belong, Kra-Dai. The term follows the
popular tradition of juxtaposing two big language members of the
family, which sometimes are also linguistically distant enough from
each other to give the feel of the whole family (cf. Sino-Tibetan,
Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer, etc). Such "dual" names appear to have proved
practical; the longer names have seemed to be less successful in
competition. For instance the term "Kam-Tai" which represents the Tai
and Kam-Sui branches have quickly taken over the older names such as
"Tai-Kam-Sui-Mak" (the last three members belong to the Kam-Sui branch).

Rereading that, I see the first line might give the impression that
Kra is a language, though it is actually a group of languages.

Dai in Kra-Dai also refers to a group of languages; it "is the
reconstructed form of autonyms of various Tai groups" such as the Thai.
I like Dai as it avoids the homophonous confusion of Tai and Thai
in English. Dai
does have homophony problems of its own, but as a proto-word it is
the shared heritage of all Tai peoples.

'Tungusic', on the other hand, is not based on a proto-autonym
shared by most Tungusic languages (or even most non-Jurchenic Tungusic
languages); it is a
Turkic word for 'pig' that was an exonym of the Evenks. It has
stuck in English, and I doubt it has any potential serious competitor
other than Manchu-Tungusic: e.g., Eweno-Jurchenic.

1. Related or abbreviated? For years I thought of
<SNAKE> as resembling 厄 'adversity', but today I
finally realized it's related to the right side of 蛇 Chinese 'snake'.
The
left side 虫 'bug' is a later addition; the right side 它 was originally
a
standalone drawing of a snake. <SNAKE> may be from a northeastern
version of 它 that became part of the Parhae script. I then saw that Jin
Qizong (1984: 35) thought <SNAKE> is an abbreviation of 蛇.

2. Today I also wondered if <he> could somehow be related to
the graph for Jin Chinese 黑 *xə 'black'. If <he> goes
back to the
Parhae script or even earlier, then its original phonetic value may
have been *xək like the Middle Chinese reading of 黑. Native
Jurchen words
can only end in -n, so it would be understandable if the
Jurchen took a Parhae graph for *xək and used it to write their
he
[xə].

3. Two days ago I was reading Jonathan Evans' Introduction to
Qiang Phonology and Lexicon (2001: 182) on the "weak role of tone
in [Qiang] tonal dialects". He got different tones for the morpheme
'finger' in the names of the five fingers in two different recording
sessions:

session 1: low (4×), high (1×)

session 2: high (5×)

Was Tangut like its modern living Qiang relatives? Were its tones as
unstable? Or as unstable at some earlier point in its history before
they 'settled down' to the point where a rhyme dictionary organized by
tone (the Tangraphic Sea) made sense? Is my assumption that the
'rising tone' originated from a final glottal *-H misguided? I
fear the history of Tangut tones is complex.

The dedication is to Elena N. Nevskaja, the late daughter of NA
Nevsky, the greatest Tangutologist of all. I am saddened to learn she
is gone.

5. Going back to Evans, I was looking at his reconstructions of
Proto-Southern Qiang (PSQ) initial clusters (2001: 165-166). Looking at
*KC-clusters,
it is tempting to phonologize them all with a preinitial /k/ whose
aspiration and voicing are conditioned by the following initial:

PSQ

PSQ (phonological)

Longxi

Mianchi

Taoping

*khs-

*/ks-/

tsh- before e, tɕh- elsewhere

s-

khs-

*khr-

*/kr̥-/

ɕ-

s-

khʂ-

*khɕ-

*/kɕ-/

ɕ-, tsh-

s-, ɕ-

khɕ-

*gz-

*/kz-/

?

z-

gz-

*gʑ-

*/kʑ-/

dʑ-

ʑ-

gʑ-

*gr-

*/kr-/

gɹ-, dz-

g-, dʐ-

gʑ- before y,gʐ- elsewhere

Such assimilation has a modern parallel in Taoping in which
preinitial /χ/ is [ʁ] before voiced initials.

But that analysis requires a voiceless /r̥/, a consonant not
reconstructed elsewhere in PSQ. Moreover, it doesn't work for *PC-clusters:

PSQ

PSQ (phonological)

Longxi

Mianchi

Taoping

*pz-

*?

p-

p

pz-

*bz-

*/pz-/

b-

bʐ-

bz-

*br-

*/pr-/

b(ɹ)-

bʐ-

*pr-

*?

p-

pʐ-

*phr-

*/pr̥-/

ph-

pʂ-

phʐ-

Or does it? What if Evans' *pz-, *pr-, and *phr- are
*/ps- pr̥- pʂ-/?

2.14.17:14: I could also reinterpret *khr- as /kʂ-/ to
parallel *phr- /pʂ-/. All voiceless sibilants would then
condition aspiration of the preinitial: */CS̥/ = *ChS-.
Nonsibilant */r̥/ would not: */pr̥/ = *pr- (not *phr-).
No, not all - */ps/ isn't *phs-, it's ... *pz-!
/voiceless/ + /voiceless/ = /voiced/? I think not, though maybe I could
just rewrite *pz- and *bz- as *ps- and *pz-
(i.e., regard the phonological and phonetic forms as identical) and
have
Taoping undergo a chain shift:

*/ps-/ > */pz-/ > bz-.

Still, there seems to be strong if not perfect complementary
distribution - there is a tendency against voicing mismatches: e.g., no
*kz- or *bs-. Perhaps a neater earlier system was
complicated by

- borrowings from languages with different phonotactics

- and or/by new preinitials from earlier syllables that lost their
vowels after the voicing assimilation rule ceased to operate: e.g.,

*pz- > Taoping bz-

*pVz- > Taoping pz-

The reanalysis above is motivated by a hypothesis that
Proto-Sino-Tibetan had fewer preinitials than initials: e.g., one
preinitial velar stop *k- but three initial velar stops *k-
*kʰ- *g-. But in theory Qiang could have preserved preinitials lost
in Old Chinese, Old Tibetan, pre-Tangut, Pyu, etc.

6. Today I learned that 'Jewish' in Khmer is ជ្វីស <jvīs>
[cʋih], a borrowing from French juif [ʒɥif]. Why is it spelled
with
s and not <ḥ>?

7. Looking at Vovin
(2017) again while writing footnote
2 of "The Day of the White Dragon", I noticed he
reconstructed Old Korean 日尸 <SUN.l> 'sun' (普皆廻向歌 Pogaehoehyangga,
line 5, mid-960s) as *nal. That would
seem to rule out a connection with Serbi-Mongolic forms like Khitan ñayr
'day' (as reconstructed by Shimunek 2017: 358) and Middle Mongolian naran
'sun'.

2.14.15:51: The only way around this would be to reconstruct a third
liquid or a liquid cluster in the source language of 'day/sun' that
became *r in Serbi-Mongolic but *l in Koreanic.

1. In my discussion of the Jurchen
word for 'red', I forgot to mention modern Sanjiazi Manchu fulxajn
'red' (Kim 2008: 144) corresponding to standard written Manchu fulgiyan
(which I presume to have been [fʊlɢʲaʜ]). x
seems to be from an
earlier fricative *[ʁ] rather
than a stop *[ɢ]. But why is it devoiced between voiced segments [l]
and
[a]? Is it from an earlier unaspirated stop *[q]? (Voiced stop symbols
in my Jurchen/Manchu notation may have been either voiceless
unaspirated or voiced in medial position.)

I'd like to find more instances of the g : x
correspondence.

I'd also like to find more examples of palatality moving to the end:
C₁iyVC₂
> C₁VyC₂. Having just mentioned Jurchen šanggiyan
'white' (the standard written Manchu word is the same), I would expect
a Sanjiazi form ending in -ajn, but the actual form is ɕaŋŋən
without -j- (Kim 2008: 94)
Could -ən be a reduction of *-ajn?

2. Middle Korean 븕- pɯrk- 'red' is somehow related to
Sanjiazi fulxajn. When looking for what Alexander Vovin (2009:
73) had to say about 븕- pɯrk-, I found his
proposal that the attributive suffix of Old Korean

is the source of the Proto-Japanese³
attributive
suffix *-ke.
I suspect the Koreanic source of loans in Proto-Japanese was not a
direct ancestor of Old Korean. So maybe the source language had an
attributive suffix *-ke, possibly from a Proto-Koreanic *-kɯj.
Otherwise I would expect Old Korean *-kɯj to be borrowed into
Proto-Japanese as *-kəj or even *-kɨj if Frellesvig and
Whitman's proposal of a seventh Proto-Japonic (and by extension,
Proto-Japanese) vowel *ɨ is correct.

An apparent paradox just occurred to me: Old Korean
has -Vj where the Koreanic source of Proto-Japanese loanwords
has *-e and vice versa:

Or was Jurchen ai an attempt to approximate a Koreanic
*[e]? a is nonhigh like *[e] and i is palatal like *[e].

Maybe this can be resolved at the Proto-Koreanic level. And/or maybe
there was more than one Koreanic source of Proto-Japanese loanwords:
e.g., one language at two different periods or two languages/dialects
at once.

3. A sequel to my proposal of *rjaC > rar4 in
Tangut: I looked up all three rar4 words with etymologies in
Jacques (2014), and none have cognates with *-j-:

If Gong Xun is right, all three had a simple initial *r- in
pre-Tangut like the cognates for the last two words:

2rar4 < *rak-H? 'horse'

1rar4 < *rat 'write'

1rar4 < *raC 'must' (but why does Tangut have a final
consonant corresponding to zero in Japhug and Written Burmese?)

That's simpler than my scenario in which Grade IV lower vowels are
'bent up' by preceding high vowels in presyllables that were lost:

rar4 < *Cɯ.raC

On the basis of Japhug and Written Burmese, I could propose *mɯ.rak-H
as the source of 2rar4.
But there is no external evidence for presyllables for 'to write' and
'must'; at this point they are merely constructs necessitated by my
theory.

The relative simplicity of Gong's theory and mine is reversed with
Grade I (there are no Grade II or III syllables with r-):

rar1 < *raʶ (Gong) but *(Cʌ.)ra
(this site)

The advantage of my theory is that it requires no exotic segments
like uvularized *aʶ. (But nonexotic segments not supported by
external evidence are not to be embraced.)

The ratio of rar1 to rar4 in my database of Tangut
character readings (≠ morphemes or words!) At a glance that may
suggest Gong's *aʶ (> a1) was almost as common as
his *a (> a4),
which seems implausible. However, a count of types is not a count of
tokens. Phonemic frequency analysis of Tangut texts remains to be
done.

4. Yesterday I learned who founded Taitō
and why it has its name -
the kanji are 太東, and 太 is short for 猶太 'Jewish', a reference to
Michael Kogan's background. 猶太, pronounced [jowtʰaj] in standard
Mandarin, is a Chinese phonetic transcription of a form like Judaea.

After so many years, I finally wondered -
why does the d of Judaea correspond to an aspirated
[tʰ]
in most Chinese readings of
太⁶: e.g., standard Mandarin [tʰaj]? Was 太 'great'
chosen more for its meaning than its phonetic value? But then why not
transcribe dae as 大 'great' without a dot and with either an
unaspirated [t] or a voiced [d] depending on Chinese variety?

(2.13.22:48: Answering my own question, I learned that 猶大 without a
dot already exists as the Chinese borrowing of Judah [son of Jacob]
and, in Protestantism, Judas and Jude. But I would imagine 猶
太 predates 猶大, so it wouldn't be as if 猶大 were already taken. I could
be wrong, though. I don't have time to track down those words.

I don't know what the earliest Chinese term for 'Jewish' was. The English
and Chinese
Wikipedia mention Yuan dynasty terms 竹忽 *tʂu xu and 朱乎得 *tʂu
xu tə as terms for Jews, but I can't find any attestations at Scripta Sinica.
The initial *tʂ- is odd since I would expect a glide *j-.
What language with an affricate-initial word for 'Jew' would be a
plausible source for those borrowings?

had what looked like Jin Chinese 不 *pu 'not' on the bottom
because it was originally intended to write a Koreanic word *an
'not'. That was an extremely stupid idea, even
'wronger' than usual for this site, because an isn't attested
until the late 1800s (Martin 1992: 419); the earlier Korean form was
disyllabic ani.

But maybe that idea can be salvaged minus the anachronistic
reference to an.
Today I saw Alexander Vovin's "Two
Tungusic Etymologies" (2018) in which he reads Late Old Korean 不知
<NOT.ti> as anti 'not'. So 不 was read an-, though
that was still centuries before there was a standalone word an
'not'. He then proposes that Proto-Korean *an-negatives
are the sources of Tungusic negatives. That borrowing must have
occurred very long ago - long before the rise (and fall) of Parhae in
the second half of the first millennium CE.
Still, the idea of Jurchen speakers knowing of Koreanic an-negatives
now seems a bit more plausible.

7. Some new terms for convenience:

North Koreanic: hypothetical prestige language of Parhae
underlying the Parhae script. Inexplicable sound-symbol matches in the
Khitan and Jurchen large scripts (e.g., why write Jurchen an
with a character 不 read *pu in Jin Chinese?) might involve
North Koreanic readings.

Late Koreanic loans in Jurchen (e.g., taira(n) 'temple') are
from North Koreanic.

South Koreanic: source language(s) of Koreanic loans in
Proto-Japanese and Old Japanese. The inconsistent correspondences
between Old Japanese and Old Korean *e may reflect borrowings
from two varieties of South Koreanic, 'A' (from Paekche?) and 'B' (from
Kaya?). The Old Korean of Shilla may be a third variety, 'C'.

Japanese tera 'temple' is a loan from South Koreanic, so
there is no need to come up with a single early Koreanic form
underlying both Jurchen taira(n) and Japanese tera; the
vowel of the first syllable could have developed differently in North
and South Koreanic.

I could just use terms like 'Koguryo' for North Koreanic and
'Paekche' for South Koreanic, but I want to avoid conflating languages
with states, particularly given the presence of a Japonic and perhaps
even Tungusic substratum on the peninsula.

¹2.13.23:02: Korean 'red' and 'bright' are
thought to be related via ablaut (Vovin 2009: 7). In Middle Korean,
they both have -r-, but I reconstruct -l- for Old
Korean for both words, given that

²2.13.23:24: The sequence *ʌ ... ɯ looks
bizarre from a
Middle Korean perspective because it combines a lower vowel stem with a
higher vowel suffix, but Old Korean did not have vowel harmony (Vovin
2009: 11). I suspect that vowel harmony was introduced into Korean by
Tungusic speakers in the northern half of the peninsula. But is there
any evidence for more vowel harmony in northern Korean than in southern
Korean?

The sequence *pʌlk-kɯj is bizarre in another way: the normal
Korean attributive suffix is -ɯn: cf. 去隱 <LEAVE.ɯn> for *?-ɯn
'left' in 慕竹旨郞歌 Mojukchirangga (c. 700).

Stranger still, it is also possible to interpret 明期
<BRIGHT.kɯj> as *pʌlk-ɯj 'bright-GEN'. Strange because pʌlk-
is a verbal root that should not be followed by a genitive suffix.
Could *pʌlk-ɯj be a remnant of a time when the verb/noun
distinction was not as strict?

³2.13.13:33: Proto-Japanese is distinct
from Proto-Japonic:

Proto-Japonic

Proto-Japanese

Proto-Ryukyuan

Japanese dialects

Ryukyuan languages

Proto-Japonic is the ancestor of the entire family. Proto-Japanese
is the ancestor of the dialects of mainland Japan.

⁴2.13.13:01: E in my
Möllendorff-style notation for (pre-)Jurchen
represents [ə], not [e]. [i] was the only front vowel in (pre-)Jurchen.

⁵2.13.13:43: Alexander Vovin (2007: 77) proposed
Old Korean *tiara 'temple' and metathesis in Jurchen (*ia
> ai) to work around the impossibility of the initial
cluster tj- in Jurchen.

⁶2.14.0:31: The major exception is Toisanese in which
[tʰ] became [h], so 猶太 theoretically would be read [ziwhaj]. (*j-
became [z] in Toisanese - a sound change shared by Vietnamese.)
But I have no idea if [ziwhaj] is the actual Toisanese word for
'Jewish'. I don't know how far 'syllabic conversion' goes in
nonstandard Chinese varieties. Have Toisanese speakers simply borrowed Cantonese
猶太 [jɐwtʰaːj]?

I hope I read that correctly. 妲 can also be read [tʰaːn]. That might
be a recent modern reading by analogy with 袒 and 坦, both [tʰaːn]. Jiyun (1037)
lists two
fanqie for 妲:

- 當割切 for *tat, corresponding to Cantonese [taːt]

- 得案切 for *tan which should correspond to Cantonese
†[taːn]
with unaspirated [t]

The only Mandarin reading I know of is da [ta] from *tat,
so I guessed that 妲 was [taːt] in 妮妲莉 'Natalie' (even though I'd expect
an aspirated [tʰ] corresponding to written -t-). Is the
Cantonese name based on an American pronunciation [næɾəli] with
a voiced
alveolar flap [ɾ]? If so, then unaspirated [t] would be a better
match for [ɾ] than aspirated [tʰ].

I don't have time to even make a list
like last
night¹. And I don't want to wait another twelve days to say this,
so ...

It's not clear how the Ming Jurchen would have written 'hare' in
their script. The
Bureau of Translators vocabulary (early 1400s?) has the Ming Mandarin
transcription

古魯麻孩 *ku lu ma xaj (#150)

for a two-character spelling ending in a phonogram

<HARE.hai> gulmahai

whereas the Bureau of Interpreters vocabulary (c. 1500?) without
Jurchen script has the
Ming Mandarin transcription

姑麻洪 *ku ma xuŋ (#1100)

for gu[l]mahun (Kane 1989: 218) which reflects a different
suffix found in Manchu gūlmahūn².

Kiyose (1977: 105) suggested that the Bureau of Translators form gulmahai
is genitive, implying that the word for 'hare' without the genitive
case marker -i was *gulmaha³.
But if
that as the case, how would -ha have been written? N3696 lists
eight different Jurchen characters read xa (= my ha
[χa]).

Here I've followed Andrew
West who regards 'hare' as simply gulma sans suffixes, but
at present I cannot confirm that shorter reading because the only
phonetic evidence for the word I have on hand are the two
transcriptions above. I do not know of any Jin dynasty attestations of
the word. I suspect that the original spelling was a single logogram
*<HARE>. However, I cannot say whether *<HARE> would have
been read as *gūlma, *gūlmaha, *gūlmahūn, or something else.

¹2.12.0:49: I did make notes for a list to appear
in this entry, but I lost it due to computer problems. I should
reconstruct it later today before I forget.

²2.12.10:39: -hūn is probably the same
suffix found in Manchu indahūn 'dog' and Ming Jurchen

from the Jurchen Character Book
manuscript thought to be an early catalog of characters represented indahūn⁴, the bare root inda, or
even inda
with a different suffix. It's even possible that Proto-Tungusic *ŋ-
(cf. the Orok form above) was still present in the Jin Jurchen word
for 'dog'.

The function of -hūn is unclear to me. It does not seem to
be the -hūn that Gorelova (2002: 148-150) regards as a suffix
for Manchu quality nouns: e.g., aibishūn 'swollen, swelling
(n.)' (cf. aibimbi 'to swell').

³2.12.9:39: See Gorelova (2002: 114) for examples
of the Manchu noun suffix -ha. It is unclear to me how she
distinguishes between nouns with -ha suffixes and nouns with
unsuffixed roots ending in -ha (assuming the latter type of
noun exists in her view).

⁴2.12.10:28: Jin Jurchen probably had a Manchu-like u/ū
[u/ʊ] distinction lost in the dialect recorded by the Bureau of
Translators. See Kiyose (1977: 45-46) on how Ming Jurchen spellings
indicate the loss of that distinction.

It is unclear whether the Bureau of Interpreters dialect retained
the distinction because there would be no clear way to indicate it in
Ming Mandarin transcriptions: e.g., *ku ma xuŋ could represent
either gu[l]mahun as Kane thought or gulmahūn.

I'm going to try something new. I have too many topics on my mind
and not enough time to cover any of them properly. Yet I don't want
them to slip away forgotten or remain as unfinished stub entries, never
to be completed. So I'll just make a quick list of topics I might
return to later. Might.

1. In "The Day of the Red Ox", I
didn't mention Middle Korean 븕 pŭrk- 'red' which is somehow
related to the Mongolic/Tungusic word for 'red'. Was -ŭ- [ɯ] an
attempt to imitate a foreign [ʊ]? Here's a modern
Korean book in which English took [tʰʊk] is phonetically
rendered in hangul as 특 thŭk [tʰɯk].

2. Looking at the cover of Jacques (2014) with
examples of Tangut ar4 words, I realized that maybe I was wrong
about pre-Tangut *rjaC becoming Tangut ar4. Maybe *rjaC
became rar4, whereas *CV-rjaC became ar4: i.e.,
*-rj- lenited to zero between a presyllable and the main vowel.
(Actually, I think ar4 was phonetically something like [jæʳ],
so maybe *-rj- was reduced to *-j-.)

3. I wish this
page on Tungusic from 1998 were rewritten in Unicode. Maybe it'd be
legible if I dug up an old pre-Unicode SIL phonetic font.

Knowledge of the rules of vowel harmony is fading, as vowel
harmony is a complex topic for elementary speakers to grasp, the
language is severely endangered (Janhunen), and many speakers are
multilingual.

5. For three years I've agreed with Beckwith (2002) who was the
first to propose that Pyu aṁ was [ɛ]. I've been assuming that aṁ
[ɛ] < *e. Today I realized that maybe it could partly
directly come from *ja: e.g.,

*ja > *jæ > *jɛ > [ɛ]

in hrat·ṁ [r̥ɛt] 'eight' (cf. Old Tibetan brgyad
'eight').

6. For years I've wanted to convert transcriptions of Rouran names
into Middle Chinese and see if anything interesting emerges. Here's an
example: 郁久閭社崙 ʔuk kuʔ lɨə dʑiæʔ lon for 'Yujiulü Shelun'
in modern standard Mandarin.

It is hard at a glance to tell whether 'red' was disyllabic [fʊlɢʲaʜ]³ (i.e., identical to later standard
Manchu fulgiyan⁴) or trisyllabic
[fʊlaɢʲaʜ]. The
Bureau of Translators vocabulary (early 1400s?) has the trisyllabic
transcription

弗剌江 *fu la kjaŋ (#617)

whereas the Bureau of Interpreters vocabulary (c. 1500?) has the
disyllabic transcription

伏良 *fu ljaŋ (#1100)

The obvious solution would be to posit [a]-loss: earlier trisyllabic
[fʊlaɢʲaʜ] became later disyllabic [fʊlɢʲaʜ]. But it is not
clear that the varieties of Jurchen
within the two vocabularies are two snapshots of the same dialect at
two different points in time. It is not even clear that each vocabulary
is homogeneous: i.e., reflecting only a single dialect rather than a
mix learned from various informants who may not even have been
contemporaries. Lastly, it is possible that Ming Mandarin *la
was merely a device to write a simple Jurchen [l]. There was no Ming
Mandarin syllable *ful (and hence no character for such a
syllable), so [fʊl] might have been transcribed as 弗剌 *fu la.
On the other hand, other
Tungusic languages do have an a after l
in 'red', and the undoubtedly related Proto-Mongolic word
for 'red' does have an *a between *l and *g:
*hulagan, suggesting that the *a at least dates back to
when Tungusic borrowed the word from Mongolic (or vice versa?). I
should look into this more.

As for 'ox', the Bureau of Translators vocabulary has the
transcription

委罕 *wej xan (#143)

whereas the Bureau of Interpreters vocabulary has the transcription

亦哈 *i xa (#411)

Jin (1984: 128) takes the transcription *wej xan at face
value, reconstructing Jurchen weixan (= weihan in my
notation) which violates vowel harmony (e and a
belong to opposing vowel classes and should normally not be in the same
root). Kiyose (1977: 105), on the other hand, disregards the *w-
without explanation and reconstructs Jurchen ihan which matches
Manchu ihan [ɪχaʜ] 'ox'. Kane's
(1989: 216)
reconstruction of iha is straightforward.⁵

Once again, the obvious solution is to posit loss over time: earlier
wi- became later i-. The *-e- of the
transcription simply reflects the fact that Ming Mandarin had no
syllable *wi; *wei was the closest match for Jurchen [wɪ].
Manchu has no wi, so all early Jurchen wi became later
Jurchen/Manchu i. Japanese had the same wi > i
change, which is why the kana / for <wi> are now obsolete.

The trouble is that there is no support elsewhere in Tungusic for an
initial w- in 'ox'; all the non-Jurchen forms in Cincius (1975:
299) start with i-type vowels. (Oddly I cannot find the 'ox'
cognate set at starling.)

Is it possible that Jurchen once preserved a Proto-Tungusic *w- that
all other languages lost before *i⁶,
even though Jurchen/Manchu is considered innovative? There is no a
priori reason to reject that possibility; a language that is innovative
in many ways can still be conservative in at least one way. Ideally I
would like to find other cases of Jurchen wi- corresponding to i-
elsewhere in Tungusic.

¹2.10.13:45: I have only seen this character
followed by <giyan> in the Bureau of Translators vocabulary.
Nonetheless I don't think it was a Ming dynasty addition to the Jurchen
character set. It is not attested in words other than 'red'. So I
suspect that it was originally a standalone logogram <RED> and
that <giyan> was added later to represent its final syllable.

²2.10.13:55: This character appears by itself in
the Jurchen Character Book
manuscript thought to be an early catalog of characters. That suggests
it was originally a standalone logogram <OX> and that the
<an> in theBureau of Translators vocabulary is a later addition.

³2.10.23:29: Or perhaps [fʊlʁʲaʜ] with [ʁ].
The Bureau of Interpreters transcription without *k might
indicate that the uvular stop had lenited to the point where it was
hard to perceive.

⁴2.10.17:17: The Manchu spelling fulgiyan
appears trisyllabic, but -iy- is just a means to write
palatalization.

⁵2.10.14:19: The absence of an -n present
in Manchu is a common trait of the Bureau of Interpreters inscriptions.
See Kane (1989: 112) for other cases of a Jurchen zero : Manchu -n
correspondence.

⁶2.10.23:27: Cincius' enormous Tungusic dictionary
(1975) only has six pages of entries for в- <v> and only two
entries for ви- <vi>, both for Evenki words without cognates
elsewhere. So it does not appear there is any obvious modern (i.e.,
non-Jurchen) evidence for reconstructing Proto-Tungusic *wi-. I
suspect *w- was once far more frequent and lost in most
environments (e.g., in Manchu w is only possible before a
and e). The only *w-word I could find in starling's
Proto-Tungusic is *wa- 'kill' which is solidly
attested throughout the family.

As tempting as it may be to reject wi- in Jurchen (and, by
extension, earlier Tungusic), the Chinese transcription 委 *wej
is difficult to explain away since (1) the Chinese could have easily
chosen an *i-character to write a Jurchen i- and (2) I
cannot think of any *i-character that might be miswritten as 委 *wej.

Tonight it occurred to me that the Manchu script was ironically
credited to two men with non-Manchu names, Erdeni and G'ag'ai.

Erdeni is the Mongolian borrowing of Sanskrit ratna- 'jewel'
with an initial vowel added to avoid an initial r- forbidden by
Mongolian phonotactics.

Crossley (2000: 185) wrote,

Like those of many leaders of the Nurgaci period, Erdeni's
origins are difficult to characterize. He had a Mongol name and
certainly could write Mongolian [the written language used by the
late Ming Jurchen, just as the Jin Jurchen before them had used Khitan];
he may have been a native of a Mongolian-speaking region. But the early
Manchu records suggest that he was also expert in Chinese, and that in
his contemporary frame he functioned as a Nikan.

Nikan is Manchu for 'Chinese', and in Crossley's view, the
term does not simply mean 'of Chinese descent'; it refers to "those who
behaved as Chinese" (2000: 55). One could be ethnically Mongol - or
Jurchen or Korean - and function as Nikan.

Crossley (2000: 188) speculates that G'ag'ai might have been of
Nikan "background" (ethnicity) "but in fact it [his heritage?] was
irrelevant" since his "responsibility for literate acts under the
[Jurchen] state" made him live as a Nikan.

²2.9.1:21: There are, in fact, no [ka]
syllables in 'Phags-pa transcription a few centuries earlier, and [ka] only has a marginal status in modern
standard
Mandarin⁴. Windows 10's Pinyin IME's first suggestion for Pinyin ga
[ka] is the transcription character 噶 for foreign ga: e.g.,
喀什噶爾 Kāshígá'ěr 'Kashgar'
and ... 噶蓋 Gágài, the Chinese transcription of 'G'ag'ai'.
The other ga-suggestions are 嘎尕尬旮呷軋釓尜伽咖戛夾胳嘠錷玍魀, none of which
I've ever seen in a name.

³2.9.1:01. I don't know if
intervocalic voicing already existed in 16th century Korean. [aj] did
not monophthongize to [ɛ] until the "end of the eighteenth century"
(Lee & Ramsey 2011: 264).

⁴2.9.1:12: Old Chinese was full of *ka
(= Baxter and Sagart's *kˁa) which became Middle Chinese *ko
which in turn became modern standard Mandarin [ku].

Middle Chinese gained a new *ka from Old Chinese *kaj.
(The final *-j shielded *-a from raising before being
lost.) This too was lost in modern standard Mandarin: the new *ka
became *ko and then [kɤ].

1. It has the typical Chinese three-syllable pattern, it contains
the Chinese syllable k'ang with a
velar-a combination
[ka] absent from native Manchu words¹, and it even has a
meaningful,
positive Chinese character spelling: 'good-fortune health peace'. Yet
it is romanized as a trisyllabic single name because it is not a
Chinese name - 福Fu is not his surname, though it may have been
influenced by his clan name Fuca (spelled with a different fu,
富 'rich', in Chinese: 富察). And his personal name was not 康安 K'anggan;
it was Fuk'anggan. At most I could say that Fuk'anggan is a Sino-Manchu
hybrid; it wouldn't have been a Jurchen name many centuries ago.

2. I would not expect 安 to correspond to Manchu gan; it was
read an in Beijing.

Does gan for 安 reflect the influence of a Mandarin dialect
in which 安 was read ŋan? (2.8.0:04: There are
many such dialects today.) [ŋ] was not a possible syllable-initial
consonant in Manchu, so [ŋŋ] was not possible word-internally in
Manchu, and [fukʰaŋɢan] would be the closest Manchu approximation of
a Mandarin *fu kʰaŋ ŋan.

¹2.8.1:08: ka in the Möllendorff
romanization of Manchu that
I use represents [qʰa] with a uvular [qʰ]. [qʰa] is more common in
Manchu than the loan sequence [kʰa], so it makes sense to use ka
for the more frequent syllable and k'a for the less frequent
syllable. The apostrophe after velar letters corresponds to
velarity, not aspiration as in the Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin.

Möllendorff did, however, use the apostrophe for aspiration to
romanize other Manchu letters for Chinese transcription: ts'
[ts] and c' [tʂʰ] (the latter only before y in his
romanization). I favor Norman's decision to drop the aspiration in
those cases since there is no native[tsʰ] that contrasts with ts'.
Nor is there a native cy that contrasts with c'y.

Jin Qizong derived the character for ice 'new' (pronounced
with two syllables: [itɕə]) from the left side 亲 of Chinese 新 'new'. I
couldn't quite buy that because of the asymmetry of the Jurchen
character and the symmetry of 亲. But I just found the
asymmetrical Chinese variant 𢀝 from the Jin (!) dynasty dictionary
四聲篇海 Si
sheng pian hai 'Sea [of Writings] Arranged by the Four Tones'.
(I got the title translation from Imre
Galambos.)

As an adherent of Janhunen's ex
Parhis² hypothesis, I don't think the Jurchen script was
Chinese mutiliated on the spot by Wanyan Xiyin in 1119. Rather, I think
完顏希尹 Wanyan Xiyin
adapted an existing Parhae script that was a local (i.e., Manchurian)
variant of the Chinese script. And the character for 'new' in the
Parhae script might have been that variant 𢀝 or something close to it
-
possibly even identical to the Jurchen character.

In the early 90s I borrowed every book of Karlgren's I could find.
My favorite remains his 1954 Compendium of
Phonetics in Ancient Chinese and Archaic Chinese which walked
me through the reasoning behind his reconstructions. I no longer agree
with him on many matters, but at least I know why he did what he did. A
scientist must insure that his results are replicable and not seemingly
pulled out of a hat.

When I first saw Pulleyblank's Middle Chinese (1984) in
1992, my gut reaction was disbelief. Chinese couldn't have looked like
that! Too bizarre! It would be another year before a second look at
Pulleyblank persuaded me.

If I had never become a Pulleyblank fan, I would enjoy Cikoski's
book more. Cikoski picks up where Karlgren left off and builds upon the
master's reconstruction while still avoiding what he perceives as the
pitfalls of modern approaches. Details later.

2.5.21:17: But in the meantime I found the other volumes of his Lexicon
with a copyright notice, covers, and a non-Unicode Grammata Serica
font with a key here.

Today I realized that's who Wilhelm Grube
was when I read his
Wikipedia entry. I've known about him since the
mid-90s. I have no idea why it took me so long to see the obvious.

I also saw Andrew West's
scan of Grube's
seal (葛祿博藏書印 'Seal of the Library of Ge Lubo', read from top to
bottom, right to left):

書
shū 'book'

博-bó

葛Gé

印
yìn 'seal'

藏cáng 'to store'

祿Lù-

I didn't recognize the seal form of 藏 'to store'; it's so much
simpler than the regular print form 藏. The closest Unicode match is in
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B: 𤖋. I'm surprised 𤖋 is not in this
list of 28 variants of 藏.

As simple as 𤖋 is, it's not as simple as the proposed second-round
simplified character
䒙 - one of the lucky ones in Unicode (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension
A, to be exact). Some second-round characters still aren't in Unicode
(and are marked in red on Andrew West's page).
It's incredible ... we can type Tangut in Unicode but not "newspapers,
books, and publications of all kinds" written in second-round
simplified characters in 1978.

藏/𤖋/䒙 has two standard Mandarin readings, cáng and zàng.
Neither quite matches the reading of the phonetic of 䒙, 上 shàng. However,
上 is a very transparent phonetic for 䒙 in Wu varieties like Suzhou in
which both 藏/𤖋/䒙 and 上 can be [zɒŋ]¹ (ignoring tonal differences;
compare the readings here
and here).

got me thinking about Marshallese vowels and the perpetual mystery
of Tangut rhymes again for the first time since 2014. The very
first time I thought of comparing Marshallese with Tangut was in 2010.
And nearly a decade later, it was the sight of Kwajalein
in IPA that got me on that track again:

Similarily, the complex vowels of Tangut could have been just six
basic vowels (u i a y e o)
that 'warped' under the influence of consonants with various qualities
(pharyngealized, uvularized, and plain from a Xun Gong-type
perspective).

The 'grades' of Tangut correspond to those qualities. I write grades
as numbers after basic vowels: e.g., ka1 is grade I ka.

I could write Marshallese using a similar notation: e.g.,
/kʷɨwatʲlʲɜjɜnʲ/ (?) 'Kwajalein' as k1ɨw1at3l3ɜjɜn3. I can't
place the 'grade' numbers after the vowels since vowels are
influenced by consonants on either side, and not all consonants are
followed by phonemic vowels. In my Marshallese 'grade' system, 1 is
labial(ized)
and 3 is palata(lized); 2 - not in 'Kwajalein' - is velar(ized).

intellectual sport - to write a given language with as few
simple letters as possible, preferably no other than those to be found
on an American typewriter.

/ʷ/, /ʲ/, and /ɜ/ obviously aren't found on an American typewriter
(or any typewriter unless it's been customized, I imagine), but the
problem remains: how far should a phonemic analysis go before it no
longer corresponds to reality?

Thirty years ago tonight, リュムナデスのカー
サ Ryumunadesu no Kāsa 'Limnades Caça' made his animated
debut on Saint Seiya. I had first seen him in the manga some
months before that. That was my first exposure to the name of a kind of naiad. I had
assumed the Greek name was Lymnades since Japanese
borrows Greek y as yu. But in fact the closest Greek
name is Λιμνάδες Limnádes with i, not y.

Could mangaka Kurumada Masami have arbitrarily changed リムナデス
Rimunadesu to リュムナデス Ryumunadesu?
I have doubts because I don't remember him altering any other foreign
mythological names. This
page lists many of those names as spelled in his manga/the anime:
e.g., スキュラ Skyura
'Σκύλλα Scylla' (with the expected yu : Greek
y correspondence).

The same katakana spelling appears in 門あさ美 Kado Asami's song title リュム
ナデス Ryumunadesu from 1985 - three years before the Ryumunadesu
in the Saint Seiya manga. Did Kurumada get his spelling from
the song, or do both attestations of Ryumunadesu independently
derive from a common source?

The fact that this
entry in 幻想世界神話辞典 Gensō sekai shinwa jiten 'Fantasy and
World Mythology Dictionary') is titled リュムナデス Ryumunadesu
and cites two sources

suggests that the リュムナデス Ryumunadesu
spelling has a life beyond and a history predating the Seiya
character and the song title.

Might リュムナデス Ryumunadesu have originated as a
error by some Meiji period translator who confused Greek i with
y? I'm guessing the spelling might go as far back as Meiji since
I can't imagine the Japanese only learning about the Limnades during
the last century. Unfortunately Google Books Ngram Viewer
doesn't do Japanese yet, so I can't see any attestations of the
spelling in old books.

If I had more time, I'd write an English dictionary of Jurchen
characters, building upon the foundation that Jin Qizong laid in his
1984 女真文辞典 Nüzhenwen cidian 'Jurchen dictionary'. Ideally it'd
be online so I could continually update it. But in reality ... you'll
get random blog entries like this one about this character or that.

Tonight's character is numbered 1284 in N3788¹.
It is only attested
as the first half of mahila 'hat' in the Sino-Jurchen
vocabulary of the Bureau of Translators (Kiyose #547):

1284 0176 <HAT la>

Although 1284 does not appear in which seems to be the earliest
surviving list of Jurchen characters, I suspect that it was originally
a standalone character for mahila 'hat' in the early 12th
century, and that
<la> was later added to it as a phonetic clarifier at some point
prior to the compilation of the Sino-Jurchen vocabulary in the 15th
century. I agree with Jin Qizong who regards it as a pictograph.

The second character 0176 is a common phonogram for la. See
Kiyose (1977: 70) for a list of its other occurrences within the
vocabulary and Jin Qizong (1984: 36-37) for examples in other texts. It
is apparently the sole Jurchen character pronounced la.

I think
of 0176 as Chinese 友 'friend' with an extra dot, but the first stroke
of
the part of 0176 resembling the 又 component (originally a drawing of a
hand, though it does not
represent a word for 'hand' in Chinese) stretches further leftward,
crossing over the 丿
stroke (part of 𠂇, a drawing of another hand). How many Chinese
students of Jurchen miswrote 0176 as 友 plus a dot?

¹If I use N4631 numbers for Khitan large script, I
might as well use
N3788 numbers for the Jurchen (large) script.

²1.28.20:35: The Tangut script is a rich
source of pareidolic
stimuli. After 23 years, I suddenly 'saw' the hand-shape in the
right-hand component 𘦳 of 𗁅 3485. (I still don't know why that component,
often regarded as 'hand', cannot stand alone and needed a vertical
stroke to be a standalone character.) If one pulls apart 又 into its
component strokes フ and 乀, inserts two more 丿 between them, and adds
two strokes 丷 on top, the result is 𘦳.

One could also subtract what I've called the 𘡊
'horned hat' and see the remaining 𘢌 as
Chinese 手 'hand' tilted 45 degrees, but I think the resemblance between
the two elements is coincidental. 𘢌 is
often (but not always!) 'person', and Grinstead (1972) has derived it
from a variant of Chinese 人 'person' with two extra intersecting
strokes on the bottom right. (Alas, that variant is not yet in Unicode.
Here
is a similar variant with three nonintersecting strokes.)

I have recently come in possession of a number of early T'ang
documents written in a script that bears very close similarity with
Tangut. These documents will be the subject of a later communication,
but they appear to solve the mystery [of the origin of the Tangut
script] discussed above. I wish to thank Prof. Edward S.I. Wang of
the Chinese Culture University in Taipei for having drawn my attention
to these documents.

Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge Kwanten never wrote about
those documents or about Tangut again.

If I assume that those documents (which I have never seen) indeed
contained a Tangut-like script from the early Tang, and if I take into
account the fact that the Tangut ruling house claimed descent from the Tuoba of the Northern Wei
(see Dunnell 1994: 157-158 for a discussion of interpretations of that
claim), I
can come up with this highly speculative and almost certainly wrong
scenario:

- The Tuoba rulers spoke both Serbi and a Tibeto-Burman language
(pre-Tangut?)

- The lost Serbi script was an offshoot of the Chinese script
designed to write both languages (cf. Pahawh Hmong
which was intented to write both Hmong and Khmu, though no examples of
Khmu in Pahawh Hmong have survived)

- The Tangut script is a western descendant of this script, and
the Parhae script is an eastern descendant. Khitan and Jurchen
large scripts both descend from the Parhae script.

One huge problem with this is that I am unaware of any evidence for
any Tibeto-Burman language in the Northern Wei. The Chinese
transcriptions of Middle Serbi analyzed by Shimunek (2017: 125-163) are
Mongolic-like (Janhunen's Para-Mongolic, a term Shimunek rejects), not
Tibeto-Burman.

Another huge problem is that there is no resemblance between the
Tangut script on the one hand and the Parhae/Jurchen/Khitan (PJK?)
scripts on the other beyond a shared set of Chinese stroke types. No
one is going to confuse Jurchen

0176 la

with the Tangut element (not character) 𘦳
'hand', much less the actual Tangut character for 'hand', 𗁅 3485 1laq1.

For many years I have assumed 0819 was read [ʊʁ] (ugh in the
loose transcription style I've been using on this site) on the basis of
two readings in Kane (2009: 183):

0729 0819 Nirug (Kane; 耶律褀墓誌 17; 23:36: corresponding to
the name of a 耶律 Yelü clan member transcribed as 涅魯古 *nje lu ku
in 遼史 History of the Liao Dynasty? related to Written Mongolian
nirughun 'back, spine, mountain range'?)

1254 0819 Qudug (Kane; name of a general in 多蘿里本郎君墓誌銘 14,
name of someone's son in 耶律褀墓誌 14 and perhaps the same person again in
line 16 of the same inscription)

Kane does not cite sources for either of these forms (or many others
in his book), so I have supplied attestations that I have seen. (I
can't say I've seen many Khitan large script texts.)

The large script name Qudug seems to correspond to Kane's
(2009: 81) reading qudug 'happiness, good fortune' for the
unusually complex small script character 380 (Kane's number)

that "Liu, Chinggeltei, Aisin Gioro and others identify [...] with“
the northern Chinese transcription 胡覩古 *xu
tu ku¹.
Normally I expect single logographs in the large script to correspond
to two-character blocks in the small script, but this is the only case
of the reverse that I can think of.

How can the [ku] reading of 0819 be reconciled with Kane's -ug
/ my [ʊʁ]? Here are two solutions:

1. Reversible readings

0819 was like Old Turkic 𐰸 which could be read as qu ~ qo
~ uq ~ oq ~ q depending on context (Tekin 1968:
24).

For years I have assumed that Khitan characters of this type were
read as CV after vowels and VC after consonants. So Nirug and Qudug
in the large script were <nir.ʊʁ> and <qʊd.ʊʁ>.

I would expect the [ku] reading (my [ʁʊ]) to be after a vowel, but I
don't know what the context was and can't test my guess.

2. Only one reading

What if the northern Chinese transcription 胡覩古 *xu tu ku
represented a Khitan [qʰʊdʊʁʊ]? Then 0819 could have been [ʁʊ]
everywhere.

The trouble is the alternate transcription 胡都 *xu tu
reflecting another strategy to deal with final consonants absent in
northern Chinese: namely, ignore them. This zero ~ *ku
alternation implies a Kitan final [k]-like consonant. The word has an
uvular initial in later languages, and in this region uvulars generally
forbid following velars. So the final consonant has to be uvular [qʰ]
or [ʁ], not velar [kʰ] or [g]. And that final consonant has to be [ʁ],
since Chinese unaspirated obstruents were used to approximate Khitan
voiced obstruents.

For now I think solution 1 is probably right. However, to be sure I
would need to see the context for which the [ku] reading was proposed.

¹Why not interpret the underlying Khitan word
as [xutuku]? The limited northern Chinese syllabary was unable to cope
with Khitan phonetics:

1. There was no northern Chinese [qʰ]. Chinese *x- (possibly
[χ]) was the closest equivalent.

2. There was no northern Chinese [ʊ], at least in open syllables.

3. There was no northern Chinese [d].

4. There was no northern Chinese [ʁ].

5. There were no final stops in northern Chinese, so foreign final
consonants were either rendered with CV-syllables or ignored (as in an
alternate transcription of the Khitan word as 胡都 *xu tu).

I will discuss the Turkic, Mongolian, Jurchen, and Manchu evidence
for this
word in a separate post. Without that evidence, it would not be
unreasonable to reconstruct *[xudug] without any uvulars or [ʊ].

I'm running out of time tonight, so I just want to say one thing
about the book. (If I had all the time in the world, I'd write a book
about the book.) Since 2019 is the 900th anniversary of the
Jurchen large script, I went to the index in search of the Jurchen
script. Seven pages are listed (xxv, 99, 105-108, 362), but flipping
through the book, I've seen more Jurchen than that. I should write a
Jurchen index for the book which has no indexes for language names and
subjects but not specific words. I'll post the index here when I'm done.

1.26.3:13: Of course I'd like to write other indexes for the book as
well.